[yourapostasy]

Would your position on vendor stability be mitigated if the SAAS was implemented as an appliance that can be imaged, which is placed under software escrow? If the vendor goes out of business, then you know that you will receive a discrete snapshot of what delivered the service (from the appliance, and the image can be dropped into a VM in your infrastructure), and you would receive all the code that the vendor created to implement the appliance.

You are no worse off than buying off the shelf software from closed-source companies, even large ones like Microsoft/IBM/Oracle that can be counted upon to be around in ten years. I see clients of mine get stranded by those companies all the time on just old versions of products that simply go out of support. In fact, if you get the appliance and the developed source code, you're in a better position because at least then you have the option to explore the feasibility of modifying the code to make it continue to work for your needs.

[lnguyen]

The reason those companies are still running the old versions is because even if they're out of support, they're known quantities. Implementing new versions will require development and testing to put in to place along with the possibility of additional upgrades (OS, other apps/libraries, etc.). Unless you have resources to handle that aspect in addition to any of your actual business, you're going to want to stay on a version for as long as possible instead of being on the upgrade treadmill that Microsoft/IBM/Oracle try to place you on.