[matwood]

I used to work in a large company with internal IT that also used quite a few SaaS providers. To your point #1, yes the providers had to provide up front how they would get our data out if we wanted to switch. They didn't have to switch it, but provide the data in a typical format (CSV, tab delimited, etc...).

Why we used SaaS was a mix of we didn't want to find and internalize the knowledge of having to do it ourselves (think payroll complexities) and we liked the flexibility of easily scaling up and down the users.

What SaaS allowed us to do was focus our IT on items that added direct business value and not commodity items like payroll.