IBM announced a new public-cloud service for enterprises, offering SAP business applications as a Platform-as-a-Service offering. The company is offering 99.7% availability guarantee for the applications that will run in its data centers and be managed by its staff.

IBM also announced the addition of a ninth data center to its global network of data centers that host its enterprise-cloud services. The new data center, expected to come online in in Barcelona by mid-2013, will add to the three North American locations, two European ones, two in the Asia-Pacific and one in Latin America already live.

The new SAP PaaS product offers the same level of assurance normally associated with a hosted service to make sure clients can always access their core applications for ERP, CRM, analytics, social business and mobile computing from the cloud, IBM said. .

“This is a logical evolution of IBM’s sourcing business that gives us an advantage both in our services relationships and the cloud market as we define a new enterprise-grade cloud today,” Jim Comfort, general manager of IBM SmartCloud Services, said.

The SAP cloud service automates and standardizes provisioning of IT environments, IBM said. The service is available for SAP Business Suite software and the SAP BusinessObjects solution portfolio.

Clients may set up their SAP solutions development and test operations on IBM’s public cloud service – SmartCloud Enterprise. Then those SAP applications can be transitioned to the SCE+ platform for production to further assure higher availability of the operations.