Easing SaaS lock-in with open source

Larry Dignan at ZDNet calls out a significant customer concern with SaaS: data lock-in, particularly if a SaaS vendor goes out of business. How can a SaaS customer get its data out of a failed SaaS system without undergoing the burden of escrow agreements?

The answer is simple, but perhaps not palatable to SaaS vendors: open source a version of their software.

SugarCRM does this, letting its customers run SugarCRM "in the cloud" but giving them the code via an open-source license so that they can support their own deployment if necessary. Why couldn't a Salesforce.com or RightNow do the same?

Answer? They could, and wouldn't even need to open source their code today. Perhaps they could create a special escrow agreement that triggers open sourcing the code upon a winding down of operations? There are problems with this, of course, as it may diminish the value of the vendor's assets, but it's a relatively clean resolution to a customer concern, and one that is already being used in the industry.

Disclosure: I am an advisor to SugarCRM.

[botchagalupe]

I think this lock in argument is just silly. Customers have been locking in for years and no has complained (SAS, SAP, Oracle, DB2, Windows, AIX, Solaris, ... shall I continue?. Now that we are talking about clouds all of the sudden everyone is concerned about lock in.

However, I think your point about open source is the strongest deterrent the the "feared" lock-in.

John
johnmwillis.com

[Matt Asay]

It's absolutely true that we've been locked in and, frankly, most of us (including CIOs) just don't care. But to the extent that one worries about it (and I cant tell you from negotiating contracts day-in/day-out that lawyers absolutely care about it), open source offers a nice way to get the escrow without the bother.

[alamp23]

why not just regularly export / back-up your data?

[jgroden]

Couldn't agree more. "Web based open source" is the new medium for companies looking to take advantage of both SaaS and open source. Open up the cloud... Another company following a similar model is SpiceCSM, check them out at www.opencsm.org.

[ITRebel]

Whatever happened to the use of disaster recovery firms to overcome this problem? A software firm does not need to expose their trade secrets by opening the code to anyone except the disaster recovery firm and the firm that purchases the software (or uses SaaS) always knows that they can get the software to run on their platform from the disaster recovery firm should anything unexpected happen. This is how we deal with the problem as a closed source firm. All parties are very happy with the arrangement.