Today's Guest Blog comes to us courtesy of Anthony Brown, Director of Application Cloud Alliances and Program Development at Sungard Availability Services.

Today's businesses face the challenge of maximizing their agility to meet rapidly changing market opportunities. At the same time, they need a reliable infrastructure for their day-to-day operational workloads. To meet both these sets of needs, many organizations are adopting a "Bimodal IT" approach. As described by Gartner, Bimodal IT is the practice of managing two separate modes of IT delivery to accommodate different types of workloads. Mode 1 focuses on safety, accuracy, and reliability for traditional workloads that an organization relies on to operate. Mode 2 is used when speed and flexibility are required, such as with born-in-the-cloud-type applications.

Together, Sungard Availability Services (Sungard AS) and Cisco continue to innovate how organizations can move their operations into and between clouds. We achieve this by supporting the breadth of an organization's IT environment and offering cloud services for Mode 2 workloads that do not come at the expense of the reliability required still needed for Mode 1 environments.

For example, Sungard Availability Services Application Cloud Services | SAP, powered by Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS), enables businesses to simplify their day-to-day operations. With capabilities such as customer relationship management (CRM), human resources, and accounting, businesses can run their entire company on a single platform.| SAP, powered by Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS), enables businesses to simplify their day-to-day operations. With capabilities such as customer relationship management (CRM), human resources, and accounting, businesses can run their entire company on a single platform.

Organizations needing greater performance are turning to SAP HANA because it runs analytics applications smarter, accelerates business processes, and makes data infrastructures easier to manage. It can serve as the foundation for all of a company's data needs by removing the burden of maintaining separated legacy systems and siloed data. It also allows businesses to adopt a robust Bimodal IT strategy.

Rather than provision and manage SAP in your own data center, you can leverage the capabilities of a service provider like Sungard Availability Services to simplify how you run your business:

• Infrastructure: Sungard AS provides the servers you need, as well as monitors and troubleshoots them for you
• Flexible: Sungard AS is one of the few providers in the industry that can provide both infrastructure up to the OS layer or a fully managed solution, depending on your needs
• Scalable: Sungard AS allows you to scale computing and storage resources as you need them
• 24/7 Support: Sungard AS provides SAP technical support as well as manages all support patches and updates for you automatically.
• Multi-site: With three data centers in North America and two in the UK, Sungard AS can provide cloud-based recovery capabilities for SAP running in your data center or in the cloud

Moving your SAP platform to a Sungard Availability Services SAP cloud, powered by Cisco UCS, offers many benefits:

• Switch from a CAPEX to OPEX operating model:Enjoy predictable pricing so you can budget better.
• Pay for only what you use:There's no need to overprovision in your data center to accommodate seasonal peaks.
• Leave the equipment to us:You don't have to invest in servers or dedicated SAP HANA appliances.
• Scale dynamically: Have access to more resources when you need them.
• Operate securely:End-to-end security means you don't have to worry whether your data and applications are safe.
• High availability and reliability:Because your solution is running on Cisco's proven UCS servers, you are assured enterprise-class reliability. Your service has also been audited by an independent third party so you know you can connect with confidence.

Sungard AS has a long history of working with Cisco to provide you the best solutions on the market. With the SAP and SAP HANA solutions you need, you can leverage a Bimodal IT approach to your day-to-day operations that gives your business the flexibility and reliability it needs.

Learn more about how SAP HANA in the cloud can accelerate your business. Visit Sungard Availability Services at SAPPHIRE in Florida, May 17-19, booth 1070. Or contact me and I'll personally put you in touch with the right people.

Anthony Brown is a channel and sales leader, with more than 20 years of experience establishing and managing key accounts and partnerships for the Enterprise space. Experienced at building productive channel revenue streams with special expertise in high technology systems, solutions, products, and professional services. He's demonstrated success in direct sales management, effective team leadership, strategic partner recruitment, and joint-company solution development.