Thursday, July 29, 2010

Software Contract Stipulation - Trade Lead Opportunity

I am looking at a service provider for a software program.  The company developed its own proprietary programs, and customers interface with the software over the internet.  The customer downloads nothing, all software and files and databases are stored on the software vendors servers.  This is not uncommon, but I do forget the word for this model.

Anyway, what makes me nervous is the "all the eggs in one basket" risk to this.  What if the internet goes down for a while?  What if this particular company goes under?  What if they get acquired by some beastly firm, like Microsoft?  What I will propose in our contract negotiations is should any of these events occur, it triggers an event:  I get a copy of the software and all of my databases with a perennial royalty free license. In this case I will not be left high and dry should some unfortunate event occur.

(Of course, I would own a status quo copy.  Any new owner would proceed to upgrade and naturally make mine less desirable over time.  Or maybe not.  I use circa 1994 versions of MYOB because after that MYOB integrated all its new cool benefits with MicrosoftWord, and I have never seen a version since 1994 that I would like.)

But such a contract stipulation is no good if I cannot actually get a copy after a trigger event.  I would want a back-up copy of the software and my files created every day, and stored in a 3rd party "warehouse" where I could collect a copy if an when a trigger event took place.  Sort of a software escrow.

This is the business opportunity, the trade lead...  an escrow warehouse for software contracts.


3 comments:

Anonymous said...

If am not mistaken, software hosted on the host's computer is called "cloud computing".

Security and Availability seem to be the major concerns.

http://www.networkcomputing.com/cloud-computing/cloud-minuses-outweigh-pluses-for-businesses.php

John Wiley Spiers said...

There is an older term, like ASP or something... I just cannot recall it...

Anonymous said...

Perhaps you mean Application Service Provider...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Application_service_provider