SaaS: Tips for Contract Negotiation

SaaS is one of the most widely adopted cloud model in industry. With proliferation of various SaaS vendors, it is becoming difficult and time consuming to negotiate contact.

Following is the list of items which must be in consideration while discussing a SaaS Contact:
1. Setup Costs
2. Customization Costs
3. Training Fees
4. Integration costs
5. Data transfer costs – into SaaS (import)
6. Data transfer costs – out of SaaS (Export)
7. Free Pilot Period
8. Development sand boxes availability and their numbers
9. Test sand boxes availability and their numbers
10. License conversion from one model to another
11. Locked in or Escalating discounts for incremental spending
12. Fees for Non Corporate use
13. Storage fee
14. Maintenance and support fee
15. Uptime guarantee
16. Penalties
17. Audits of SLA compliance
18. Issue resolution
19. Escalation path
20. Data ownership
21. Source code ownership
22. Upgrades
           a. SaaS Infrastructure
           b. 3rd party software
           c. Developed code
23. Business continuity
24. Data security
25. Privacy issues
26. Disaster recovery
27. Suspension of Services
28. Limited Liability
29. Software license fee
30. Termination Fee
31. Pricing Model
             a. Per user
             b. Traffic based
             c. Time based
             d. Processor cycle used
             e. Storage used
32. Version control
33. Deployment strategy
34. 34. Retention/Disposition of customer's Official Records (data & metadata)
35. provision for legal holds and production of Records for eDiscovery