What Will You Do If Your Software Vendor or Shiny Web 2.0 Software Company Goes Bust

When world hears about large corporations like GM, Ford, and Chrysler struggling for cash,there is one basic question on everyone mind. What will happen to the companies I do business with everyday. In the context of software industry, it boils down to a simple question.

What will I do If my software vendor goes bust. What will happen to the all the plans I made based on it. How will I run operations or get the data back.

Answer: Get an Intellectual Property Escrow. Intellectual property will help you get access to all the source code, and help you build the system back even if the software vendor goes out of business. Here's a good FAQ on Intellectual property that can help you.

I hit on three companies that offer intellectual property services, finally choose as we had some long history working with Iron Mountain.

Iron Mountain: They offer Escrow for Saas apps, we had already worked with them and they can get it without any pain
Escrow West: They claim to offer intellectual property escrow services for affordable prices
InnovaSafe: Escrow of software and Saas based software

If you have implemented ITIL based on Saas using www.service-now.com. It is time for you to start this escrow discussion.

A few excerpts from the white paper.

A risky situation if your Saas provider goes out of business

If a SaaS provider suffers a service disruption, goes out of business or is acquired
by another company that chooses to no longer support its SaaS solutions, the
customers are far more vulnerable to a severe disruption to their business
operations.

An Intellectual property escrow service is here to help.

The escrow agreement gives the SaaS subscriber access to the
functional, executable, object code, and all the necessary components to make that
application function correctly. These can include third party tools, APIs, schematics
of software components and stacks, as well as procedural instructions on how to set
up and operate the SaaS application.

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