SunGard made an addition to its SunGard Availability Services managed IT suite, in the form of a new service designed to streamline the process of rolling out updates to live client environments.

The idea behind the new offering, named Managed Workflow, is quite simple: whenever a user wants to patch software or make provisioning-related changes, a ‘request’ is first submitted to a SunGard engineer. That individual then reviews the modifications and provides certain recommendations that are implemented to a deployment when the new code or IT resources are being pushed through.

In addition, SunGard offers a sort of hosted sandbox. Users can roll out updates to  non-managed VMs that don’t power mission-critical apps, carrying out administrative tasks via a remote log-in.

“Having a global team of skilled, quality engineers reviewing proposed cloud changes brings great value to cloud customers.  The approach enables SunGard to apply the knowledge gained from managing its cloud deployments to help ensure any change produces a successful result,” said Mark Bowker, Senior Analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group.

SunGard is expanding its cloud strategy in several different directions, and the SunGard Availability Services portfolio sits at the core of these plans. As of April 4 the company has been offering a hosted Hadoop-powered solution to a very limited crowd of early adopters – a big step towards big data integration.  Unified Analytics Services  is currently in technical preview, and will become generally available later this year according to its developer.

SunGard is branching out pretty aggressively. Last year it delved into the academia sector with a partnership with the University of Texas to research new cloud computing technologies. The project encompasses topics like Exabyte-scale remote storage and other subjects that encourage some longer-term thinking, and apparently a dedicated committee.