Some former Comdisco customers are crying foul when renewing service contracts. They say SunGard is forcing new services on them to ratchet up prices. An industry expert explains the disconnect between SunGard and some customers. "Some old Comdisco deals go back to the dark ages," says Carl Greiner, VP at Meta Group. "Some of its contracts are older than heck and have nothing to do with today's prices or levels of service." Windows, a large part of most infrastructures, is absent from those old contracts, many of which are eight years old. Even if a customer only wants mainframe support, that platform's cost has typically grown 20% each year, Greiner says. Every customer has different needs, he says, but few devote the whole infrastructure to the information-availability process, and they shouldn't. Companies that need it the most will mirror their data centers, and these companies could still use SunGard for remote offices, secondary servers, and less-than-critical apps. "Some people aren't allowing for today's environment," Greiner says. "Contracts just vary on what customers really need."
SunGard CEO Simmons claims he's unaware of any brute-force negotiating tactics. "Some customers have been with us for a couple of decades," he says, "and in three years some will migrate to three different platforms."
One customer started working with SunGard two years ago, choosing it from among four players for its national reach, stability, and ease in cutting a deal. Alan Leib, president of Stats Inc., a 20-year-old provider of sports statistics to major broadcasters and individual sports enthusiasts, started with SunGard and its disaster-recovery service, but got on board with information availability when the National Football League season began over the Labor Day weekend.
Leib was prepared for the increased interest in fantasy football, but he never dreamed he'd face double the demand and need double the bandwidth. "We held up the first weekend, but it pushed us beyond our comfort zone," Leib says. "We made the first call to SunGard Tuesday and were up and running by Friday of that week." Since then, SunGard has been Stats' Web-hosting firm.
Leib credits the mutual knowledge that Stats and SunGard share with each other as the reason for such timely implementation. "SunGard engineers do the work, but we manage it all remotely," he says.
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