Austin Business Journal | Christopher Calnan, Staff Writer

SunGard Availability Services is teaming with the University of Texas at Austin to create a cloud computing research center.

The new center is in a UT computer science building but officials said it will be part of the Bill & Melinda Gates Computer Science Complex that is under construction in late 2012.

SunGard Availability Services is a division of Pennsylvania-based SunGard Data Systems Inc. Company officials declined to disclose the amount SunGard is investing in the center except to say it’s in the high six figures.

SunGard and UT plan to identify research problems in the cloud computing field, pursue targeted research initiatives to solve those problems and commercialize the resulting research, officials said.

The center is scheduled to develop new approaches to protect data as it traverses the cloud and the Internet, and explore emerging technologies that may benefit the efficiency of massive-scale infrastructure. One of the first projects under consideration is the development of an exabyte-scale storage cloud based on existing research at UT.

SunGard and UT have created an executive committee composed of two UT faculty, including Bruce Porter, chairman and professor of computer science, and two SunGard executives.