Dell and SunGard Higher Education announced today that they will expand their existing strategic relationship to make their solutions more interoperable and help higher education institutions worldwide improve efficiencies, streamline operations and enhance learning.

The expanded relationship supports SunGard’s new Open Digital Campus strategy and gives campuses and universities wider access to open, scalable products to build out their solutions, based on Dell PowerEdge servers and Intel Xeon Processors. The companies also announced plans to open a new digital campus test center at Dell’s Central Texas headquarters for customers to preview technology solutions designed to optimize IT environments.

According to Dell, the new onsite test center will help the company’s engineers to:

• Conduct a broader range of testing on full-scale campus reference-architecture and evaluate software and hardware solutions before purchase decisions are made.
• Quickly use a portfolio of tools to help IT departments measure operational efficiency, manageability and flexibility.
• Develop co-branded sizing guides to help reduce cost and complexity of maintaining technology.
• Develop reference architectures based on unique customer environments that take into consideration interoperability challenges facing higher education today.
• Work with SunGard Higher Education to test Dell products, including Dell EqualLogic™ iSCSI storage, with SunGard products.

Higher Education CIOs increasingly face demands to expand core IT services for the campus environment, often while dealing with current budget constraints. The expanded relationship and new digital campus test center are aimed at helping higher education IT leaders worldwide meet these demands while reducing the burden associated with integrating disparate campus technologies. Recently, Dell and SunGard Higher Education hosted a roundtable as part of activities during the GITEX 2009 conference in Dubai. The roundtable addressed crucial topics in technology for education, including learning management systems, e-learning initiatives in the Middle East, and high performance clustering.

With the expanded global relationship, Dell and SunGard Higher Education can effectively provide IT departments with the solutions and services they need to help achieve greater flexibility in the way they manage the use of IT across campuses.

Quotes:

SunGard

Jim Bean, vice president of business development, SunGard Higher Education.

“Our new Open Digital Campus vision and technology strategy aims to give colleges, universities and foundations more flexibility to shape how technology meets their evolving need. As we deliver technology solutions faster with more flexible, extensible and modular components, we will work with Dell to assess full-scale configurations that reflect the IT environments and interoperability challenges facing higher education today.”

Dell

John Mullen, vice president and general manager, Education, State and Local Government, Dell.

“Our relationship with SunGard Higher Education creates a viable synergy that helps universities and colleges provide the best education experiences to their constituencies.”

Additional Resources and Information

www.dell.com/hied/sungard

http://www.sungardhe.com/partners/detail.aspx?id=1338&LangType=1033

http://www.intel.com/p/en_US/products/server/processor

About Dell

Dell Inc. (NASDAQ: DELL) listens to customers and delivers innovative technology and services they trust and value. www.dell.com

About SunGard Higher Education

SunGard Higher Education serves colleges, universities and foundations in 40 countries worldwide. Through its Open Digital Campus strategy, SunGard collaborates with the higher education community and provides software and services to help institutions find better ways to teach, learn, manage and connect. www.sungardhe.com

About SunGard

SunGard is one of the world’s leading software and IT services companies. SunGard serves more than 25,000 customers in more than 70 countries.

SunGard provides software and processing solutions for financial services, higher education and the public sector. SunGard also provides disaster recovery services, managed IT services, information availability consulting services and business continuity management software.

With annual revenue exceeding $5 billion, SunGard is ranked 435 on the Fortune 500 and is the largest privately held business software and services company on the Forbes list of private businesses. Based on information compiled by Datamonitor*, SunGard is the third largest provider of business applications software after Oracle and SAP. Continuity, Insurance & Risk has recognized SunGard as service provider of the year an unprecedented six times. For more information, please visit SunGard at www.sungard.com.

*January 2009 Technology Vendors Financial Database Tracker http://www.datamonitor.com

Trademark Information: SunGard, the SunGard logo and Open Digital Campus are trademarks or registered trademarks of SunGard Data Systems Inc. or its subsidiaries in the U.S. and other countries. All other trade names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders.