For anyone curious about how this would play out in the US, federal courts and most state courts use the Daubert standard. TLDR: experts (including statisticians) can testify if they're using fairly standard methods and there are no significant gaps in the evidence-->analysis-->testimony chain.
I haven't read any cases on this, but I imagine most courts would truncate/round down the achieved performance number. If the contract says 100%, that wouldn't allow for any downtime whatsoever.
It might be different for lower percentages - getting 89.8% performance where 90% is called for could be a de minimis breach and not actually count as breaking the contract. Definitely curious as to whether anyone has more to add on this.
They are interpreted the same way other commercial agreements are. They're also generally very lengthy and specify what they mean (i.e. what counts, what doesn't). They also set out what the consequences of breach are (maybe you want $, maybe you want something else, etc.).
There's no magic to writing "SLA" or something else. What you put in the contract is what you'll be held to...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daubert_standard http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daubert_v._Merrell_Dow_Pharmace...