SunGard Availability Services (AS), a division of SunGard Data Systems, has just reached a significant milestone as the general availability of SunGard Enterprise Cloud is scheduled to be commercially available on January 31 after spending five months in private beta and another four months in controlled availability. SunGard's latest foray (the managed service provider has made available private clouds running on dedicated VMware environments since 2008) into the multi-tenant Enterprise Cloud is an indication of the market evolution, one that began to get serious in the hosting industry during the past 18 months when a raft of hosting companies were under fire from investors and customers to provide new business models. Although SunGard's core business is in the managed services arena, which is still a growth segment in the hosting industry, a tidal wave of cloud frenzy is rising fast and it's hard to ignore.

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