SunGard To Be Acquired By Private-Equity Firms

SunGard Data Systems Inc., a provider of software for financial-services companies and "hot site" backup-and-recovery services with $3 billion in annual revenue, disclosed Monday that it has agreed to be acquired by a group of private-equity firms for $11.3 billion.

The deal is expected to be completed sometime in the third quarter. The company said last week that it was up for sale.

Also, in a surprise move, SunGard has decided not to spin off its Availability Services Business. Last week, the company said the planned spin-off, which it revealed last year, was still on track.

The question now is whether the company will be kept intact or broken up. In addition to backup and disaster-recovery services, SunGard sells software that performs trade-order execution, risk-management, and record-keeping tasks for banks, investment managers, mutual funds, brokerage firms, and investment advisers. Major product lines include brokerage and trading systems, wealth-management systems, treasury- and risk-management systems, investment-management systems, and benefit, insurance, and investor-accounting systems.

Customers would probably notice little impact if the company is broken up as many already view it as a collection of discrete entities. HVB Americas, a customer of both SunGard's disaster-recovery services and its derivatives-trading financial software, still plans to go live in July with a new backup data center in New Jersey using SunGard Availability Services, CIO David Dart says. SunGard's decision not to spin off the disaster-recovery unit is a surprise, but it will have no impact on HVB's planning decisions, he says.

The acquiring consortium is led by Silver Lake Partners and includes Bain Capital, the Blackstone Group, Goldman Sachs Capital Partners, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, Providence Equity Partners, and Texas Pacific Group.