Post-Restructuring Sungard AS Has All-New Board and Finance and Sales Chiefs

Newly restructured Sungard Availability Services announced this week that it has a new board of directors and two new C-level execs.

Half of the new board consists of representatives from lenders that swapped debt the company owed them for equity in the May bankruptcy restructuring. The other half consists of three independent data center, telecoms, and tech execs, and Sungard CEO and president Michael Robinson, who took the helm after the restructuring in May.

One of the independent experts on the board is Jarrett Appleby, who may be familiar to our readers because of his past senior roles at data center providers Digital Realty Trust, Coresite Realty, and Equinix.

The two new second-in-command executives are CFO Terrence J. Anderson and chief commercial officer Brian Crotty. Anderson comes from the telco-turned-provider of unified communications as a service Broadview Networks, and Cotty comes from the banking giant Chemical Banking Corporation.

Like many others, Sungard AS, whose business used to revolve around disaster recovery and business continuity services for enterprises, fell victim to IT industry carnage caused by the arrival of hyperscale cloud platforms. Its former parent SunGard Data Systems spun off the business in 2014. The business’s revenue was $1.2 billion in 2016 but dropped to $977 million – by 18 percent – in 2018, according to Bloomberg.

When it filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy this May, its total liabilities ($1.4 billion) were just shy of being three times the value of its assets. The restructuring deal cut two-thirds of its debt, handing control of the company to the lenders.

Those former lenders – and current equity holders – are Blackstone’s GSO Capital Partners, Angelo Gordon, The Carlyle Group, and FS Investments. Each now has a seat on the board.

The restructuring plan was pre-negotiated and was completed in less than 24 hours after the bankruptcy filing – a record in the US.

Sungard AS will continue providing data center colocation and disaster-recovery workspace, but it has also recently added managed cloud offerings for Amazon Web Services and Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS).