The UK division of US managed IT company Sungard Availability Services has entered into administration.

The company blamed the insolvency on surging UK energy prices and landlords declining to reduce rent costs, following a loss of business after Covid-19.

The company, which employs around 300 in the UK, has turned to Teneo Restructuring to help with the crisis.

Teneo has obtained interim funding to trade the business as it looks for potential buyers.

Joint administrator Benji Dymant said that the short-term funding would provide “a platform to advance the company's discussions with landlords, to optimize cost and space, and with customers, to pass through increased power costs."

He added: "The ability for the business to continue to trade in the medium to long term, either to enable a rescue of the business as a going concern or to deliver individual asset sales, will be reliant upon burden-sharing from both customers and landlords alike."

The company struggled with this year's surge in energy prices (with costs five times higher than last year), and the fact that landlords declined to reduce rents.

In a letter seen by The Register, Dymant said that Sungard had contacted customers in December to "recover increased electricity costs," and was seeking "full recovery of those costs previously incurred and paid on [the customer's] behalf as a result of services used."

Sungard AS offers colocation and managed cloud services, with JP Morgan and the UK Home Office among its customers. It operates or occupies space in seven facilities across the UK and Ireland, and also has a number of workplace recovery centers across the region.

But the Covid-19 pandemic impacted the company heavily, it said in a February 2020 financial filing. The pandemic "has resulted in sure data center and office services changing into unprofitable, with fastened lease and vitality prices not being offset by buyer income," it said in the filing.

"The corporate has taken a number of actions to mitigate these impacts, together with the graduation of negotiations with landlords and invoicing clients for added prices incurred on their behalf."

While the pandemic, energy crisis, and landlord intransigence are cited as the cause of the insolvency, Sungard's issues run deeper.

The US parent company entered into Chapter 11 bankruptcy in early 2019 as debt hit $1.4 billion against assets of $496 million.

It restructured, with creditors taking control of the company, and reducing $800m in debt.

Last year, amid rising energy costs that saw a number of UK energy firms go under, Manchester-based IT and hosting firm M247 announced it was more than doubling its prices at one of its data centers.