Law Technology

Negotiating a SLA for SaaS

By Bryan

If you are considering using a SaaS (Software as a Service) solution, John Heckman has some great advice on negotiating a Service Level Agreement. His post includes several tips on provisions to try to get included in the agreement, including:

? Specify levels for uptime, response time, support coverage, and escalation of issues (you don?t want to get stuck on hold with first-level support for hours)
? Is there a provision to have a backup of the data on a local server? This is the reverse of the usual ?Internet Backup? scheme - here your data is on the internet and your backup is local, not the other way around.

Some of his best advice comes at the end of his post, however, where he points out that now is the time to negotiate for these provisions:

You can be almost guaranteed that very few, if any, of these types of provisions are contained in a standard SLA. As always, Read the Fine Print!! Companies are trying to push everybody to SaaS formats (much more profitable for them), so right now it is a buyers? market.

Full post as published by The Connected Lawyer on April 11, 2008 (boomark / email).