As cloud services mature, they are likely to come closer to services being offered in the enterprise data center. SunGard, for example, is now offering enterprise-class application services, including highly available SAP enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications.

Since mid-November, SunGard's Availability Services unit has been offering cloud-based SAP ERP services that "meet the availability, security, operations, and capacity needs" of enterprise customers, said Indu Kodukula, executive VP and CTO, in an interview. That means all SAP applications running as a service in a SunGard data center have a guaranteed 99.95% virtual machine uptime and 99.9% production application uptime, spelled out in a service-level agreement. A 99.9% guarantee still allows 8.75 hours of downtime a year.

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