History
SunGard was formed in 1982 as a spin-off of a division of Sun Oil Company. Back in the 1970s, during a period of very low oil prices, many oil companies were diversifying their operations. Sun Oil started several businesses, including a computer services division that eventually became SunGard.
In 1986, SunGard went public and remained a public company until August of 2005 when it changed back to a private company as a result of an LBO valued at $11.4 billion. Organized by Silver Lake, the investors in the LBO included Bain Capital Partners, The Blackstone Group, Goldman Sachs & Co., Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co., Providence Equity Partners and Texas Pacific Group.
Since its inception, SunGard’s strategy has been to acquire companies with products that can be leveraged across the enterprise. SunGard has completed more than 160 acquisitions since 1986, which allows it to offer a broad portfolio of best-of-breed technology solutions to the organizations it serves.
SunGard is comprised of four businesses - Availability Services, Financial Systems, K-12 Education and Public Sector - that provide technology and infrastructure services, and software and processing solutions.
SunGard Availability Services has been a pioneer and leading provider of information availability solutions for over 25 years. With acquisitions such as Comdisco (2001), InFlow (2005) and most recently VeriCenter (2007), SunGard Availability Services continues to enhance its product/service offerings combining dedicated and shared resources tailored to specific customer information availability needs.
SunGard Financial Systems provides mission-critical software and technology services to institutions in virtually every segment of the financial services industry. The recent acquisitions of System Access (2006), a universal banking solutions for financial institutions worldwide, and Kingstar (2006), a leading provider of software and processing solutions for China's financial services industry, have strengthened SunGard’s footprint in Asia-Pacific.
In 2006, the Higher Education Public Sector Systems (HEPS) group was divided into two separate businesses. SunGard BSR, which was acquired in 1999, was merged with the newer acquisitions of Collegis (2004) and SCT (2004) to form one business dedicated to Higher Education. The new Public Sector business brought five SunGard acquisitions together - BiTech (1995), Pentamation (1999), HTE (2003), Open Software Solutions, Inc. (2004) and the UK-based Vivista Holdings Limited (2005).
SunGard K-12 Education provides district-wide software solutions designed to help teachers, administrators and parents support student achievement.
SunGard Public Sector serves a wide range of customers - nonprofit organizations, and local, state and federal government agencies - with a range of specialized enterprise resource planning and administrative solutions for functions such as accounting, human resources, payroll, utility billing, land management, public safety and criminal justice, and grant and project management.
In 2007 SunGard made a corporate commitment to sustainability. SunGard joined the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) and The Green Grid organization, a global, non-profit consortium of companies and information technology professionals dedicated to advancing energy efficiency in data centers and business computing ecosystems.