SunGard Availability Services Reviews

Pros

Supporting customers from all industries gives you the opportunity to learn about many businesses.

Cons

Poor leadership communication and opportunities for minorities to advance.

Pros

the staff is great except for the upper management team, they can not be trusted

Cons

the upper management team is harmfull to staff retention

Advice to Senior Management

talk to the employees like the TV show undercover boss

Pros

Good salary, decent working conditions, free coffee....That's about it...;)

Cons

Overworked though management thinks your not doing anything as they sit on the phone gabbing all day. Flip/flop decision making processes....major focus shifts from week to week. Middle mgt. never really knows what is REALLY going on...they admit it. Constantly letting good people go for no reason other than saving $$ for end of Q results as they continue to loose accounts one after the other. Constant revolving door in new hires.....great news for Indian people as that is all they are hiring for lower salary. Shipping many jobs over to India and I heard they are upping the user base in 2012 to almost double. Not good new for the poor American employees left at SunGard. People walk through the hallways like the "Walking-Dead"

Advice to Senior Management

Advice???? LT Management isn't going to fire themselves - so what's the point!

Pros

Pay, benefits, most of the team members

Cons

Senior management lack of ethics, hidden agendas.

Advice to Senior Management

Keep your strong employees. Your failure in the market and significant downturn of business is due to your arrogance.

Pros

Company was once a leader in disaster recovery. I made some very good friends at the company. Benefits and 401K programs are decent

Cons

Traditional recovery (high profit) in a steep decline and the company had no foresight to develop new deliverables. Very top heavy organization filled with incompetent people. Executive management changing often and it is like a revolving door. With constant change in leadership comes constant change in direction. Employees are confused and morale is terrible. Many of our best people have left or were let go for no good reason. CEO is being told what he wants to hear...not reality. Field management and sales leadership is weak at best and floundering. Large clients are leaving in droves and the lost revenue cannot be replaced. It is a shame that this once great company is struggling to stay in business. The investors want their money out and looking to sell AS....what a shame!!!!

Advice to Senior Management

My advice to the sponsors is to move all of the execs out and replace with people that have a vision and place value on the employees. You have one good L2 left in the field...get rid of the rest! Mr Stern....you can talk the talk but not "walk the walk"

Pros

- Some employees are still dedicated to the work despite the company going in decline.

Cons

The company is in a downward trajectory with declining profits, customer dissatisfaction, customer abandonment, slow development of new products, weakening employee benefits, and poor positioning in the cloud market. In the words of the CTO, it will take another 4 years to turn this company around. That's assuming the company will last that long. The company is unknown in the cloud market, and the competition is simply blowing it away. Back in the daily life of workers, we're all scrutinized by management, and they're unwilling to support a strong work/life balance. You're expected to be in your cubicle at all times. They don't readily come forward to offer telecommuting. I've seen some co-workers chastised by their managers for not being on IM and asked to file that day as a vacation. There's a serious lack of trust with the workers by management, so it's not surprising to see a high amount of turnover. Despite this recession, people are quitting! Then again, the India division is being ramped up big time, so you're forced to wonder how long you get to keep your job and whether they'll shut down this little branch in California. In the midst of this mess, there's the culture of not being truthful. Management avoids giving bad news, even though the CEO has been pleading otherwise.

Advice to Senior Management

- It's time to put management in some serious management training, especially with learning how to manage a virtual, distributed workforce. The insistence on face-to-face meetings and distrust of employees are destroying the morale, work/life balance, and productivity of employees.
- Get rid of the layers and layers of management. There are too many VPs, directors, senior managers, and program managers but no one can make a definite decision.
- Rethink the direction of the company--does it even have a direction?--by eliminating the products that are going nowhere through long months of lingering development.

Pros

onsite parking in philadelphia
flexibility for working schedules
many employees available for support
friendly staff
benefits packages were ok, but tight in the wallet

Cons

limited growth potential or career advancement
bad employment taxes
traffic was horrible around the city
very beaurocratic
difficult for any change to processes

Advice to Senior Management

higher salaries and promote when candidates are willing and able to take on new responsibilities
promote from within and be more flexible

Pros

Great place to learn and train on different technologies. co-workers and first line of management are great to work with.

Cons

No stability right now and really nned to think before decisions are made.

Advice to Senior Management

Need stability and a a direct path to where we are going.

Pros

Pay is good even if the ranges are arbitrary
Benefits good (for now - medical is being downgraded significantly soon)
Co workers (except for upper mgmt)

Cons

Layers of management are excessive
Loss of true leadership when changes happened.
A lot of good employees were let go forno good reason.
Sad to see a company fall apart before your eyes in a span of a year.

Advice to Senior Management

Reduce the layers of management and nonsense. Let the Consultants do their job and trust that they know what the customer needs.

Pros

You will get to play with infrastructure that you would not otherwise.

Cons

They are clearly struggling. They are losing money badly. The management team is trying to enter into the cloud services space to make up revenue, but they are doing horriblly at it. They have no clue what they are doing, and they just make bad decision after bad decision. They really have no chance of success.

You are expected to work long hours week after week, month after month, with break or recivery. We are talking 70-90 hour per weeks, including weekends, and on top of this they don't give any kind of stock options, so you will get nothing for all this work. There is a puny little bonus, which well they won't give out since they are losing money...

They are poorly positioned in the market. On the lower end, Amazon and Rackspace can easily out bid them, and on the higher end they have not built the capability to provide advanced services. The management has rammed technical decisions down the throats of the engineers that will come back to haunt them later, and they will in all likelyhood start loosing what few customers they do have, especially once they start experience real load in the virtual infrastrutcture.

There is a culture of not giving bad news. This goes all the way up the chain. They just want to hear how wonderful things are going, and thus never truly address any of the massive problems they have.

They will probably limp along for awhile, but I would expect that in about 12-18 months there will be massive layoffs and other cost cutting measures. They are just not making money, and there is no reason to believe they will start any time soon.

Advice to Senior Management

Stop trying to create your own reality. There is only one reality and you need to confront it head on and make serious changes. If you stay on the current course, you will not succeed, period!