The name of the company originally was an acronym which stood for Sun Guaranteed Access to Recovered Data, a reference to the disaster recovery business it helped pioneer.

[4][5] SunGard provided software and processing for financial services, K-12 and Higher Education, and the public sector.

It also provided continuity-assurance and production data center hosting services, now part of SunGard AS.

Past mergers included Performance Pathways, Vericenter, InFlow, Strohl Systems, Comdisco Continuity Services, and Guardian iT PLC on the availability side, Systems & Computer Technology Corp. (SCT) on the higher education side, and Kiodex.

Among the largest acquisitions were: Formerly listed on the NYSE (ticker symbol SDS) on August 11, 2005, the company was acquired by a consortium of seven private equity investment firms in a transaction valued at $11.3 billion.