During my 30 year tenure in IT at a very large corporation I worked on two acquisitions and one divestiture. I also worked on several projects that were not specifically M&A type activities, but placed me in a direct working relationship with consultants from firms like Accenture, PWC and others with units that specialized in these type activities. The very fact that these firms had groups that specialized in this type of activity is a testament to how frequently they occur and the direct impact on IT operations in general and s/w strategy specifically.
From my experience, I think it’s safe to say that the vast majority of M&A transactions result in the acquired firm having their entire IT stack disrupted in order to be compliant and compatible with the acquiring firm, the exceptions being Berkshire type acquisitions that pretty much don’t interfere with the operations of an acquired firm.
This is not the only reason for software subscription to likely be terminated. Companies go out of business. Companies get disenchanted with the a given s/w package as the ROI is not realized. Companies determine that there’s a better, more economical alternative. Companies at times cut costs, IT is a cost center for most companies so they often bear a disproportionate burden of these mandates. The s/w vendor fails to address bugs and other problems with their s/w. The s/w vendor fails to deliver on promised enhancements and upgrades. The s/w vendor gets acquired by a competitor which was more focused on acquiring a customer list than perpetuating a s/w package. The s/w vendor alters their business model which is viewed by a segment of their customers as detrimental to the relationship. And so forth . . .
While it is not safe to assume that once you have your SAAS application established that it can’t be replaced, it certainly is more difficult than say deciding to change hardware vendors. But that goes for any software. It is not an easy task to go from Oracle to SAP either so they usually have long legs. But M&A is probably not a high percentage activity that is going an impact on a SAAS company, plus it always doesn’t go the way you think.
I use to work for a mid-cap company using SAP and SFDC that got acquired by a much larger company. While SAP eventually sunset after a few years, the company that acquired us adopted our use of SFDC and expended the license usage 10x.
Eventually, we got spun off again and were back to a mid-cap company and lost the neg leverage with SFDC. I was talking to the global SFDC owner who wanted to consider MS CRM as it is much cheaper and seems to have matured. But the cost and mostly the effort to replace SFDC made it a non-event.