{"id":928,"date":"2008-07-15T01:00:48","date_gmt":"2008-07-15T09:00:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/?p=928"},"modified":"2008-07-15T01:00:50","modified_gmt":"2008-07-15T09:00:50","slug":"degrees-of-saas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/?p=928","title":{"rendered":"Degrees of SaaS"},"content":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve been quite curious over the last year at the differing definitions of multi-tenancy that are given by multiple SaaS vendors.\u00a0 Admittedly not being a SaaS expert, or an expert in building and housing a multi-tenant application, I\u2019ve found the contrasts to be a bit confusing.\u00a0 Apparently one can call themselves a SaaS vendor, but do almost nothing more than the old ASP vendors did when they would install an organization on a separate box and do some scheduled upgrades and maintenance for them.\u00a0 Fortunately, one of my favorite bloggers<\/a> wrote some descriptions of what he\u2019s finding In the SaaS marketplace.<\/p>\n

First-degree multi-tenancy (e.g. Salesforce.com). Here, \u201call customers are served from a single infrastructure in which every component is shared, all the way down to the tables in the database\u201d This purist approach is often called \u201cshared schema multi-tenancy because the database structure is defined by the schema and if everyone\u2019s data is stored inside that structure then by definition, everyone is sharing the same schema.\u201d<\/p>\n

Second-degree multi-tenancy (e.g. Intacct, a financial systems SaaS provider). This approach is similar to first-degree, but it \u201cuses replication much more broadly than Salesforce.com to distribute its shared-schema instances across large numbers of server clusters.\u201d A key advantage of this approach is that it can use low-cost hardware (e.g. Linux on Intel) rather than large Unix or Linux servers with massive databases. It also allows customers to operate on different versions of the system, based on which cluster they reside upon, giving some flexibility on when they upgrade to newer versions.<\/p>\n

Lesser-degree multi-tenancy (e.g. Oracle, and others). There are many variations of this type, with the shared services primarily involving shared server infrastructure. Each customer has a separate database instance. This approach provides maximum flexibility to the customer but gives up much of the scalability and economic advantages of multi-tenancy. It appears that SAP\u2019s greenfield SaaS offering for small business, Business ByDesign, is taking this approach.\u00a0 ((Scavo, Frank.\u00a0 June 18, 2008.\u00a0 :SaaS: Degrees of Multi-Tenancy.\u201d\u00a0 Retrieved from http:\/\/fscavo.blogspot.com on July 13, 2008.))<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I things I\u2019d add one more after lesser degree multi-tenancy.\u00a0 This is the SaaS vendor who thinks that they can still be SaaS and not offer multi-tenancy at all as an option.\u00a0 I\u2019ve seen this on just a couple of occasions, and while I\u2019m not sure the vendors qualify as true SaaS vendors, the market for SaaS is new enough that I\u2019m not going to be the one to attempt to sort it out.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve been quite curious over the last year at the differing definitions of multi-tenancy that are given by multiple SaaS vendors.\u00a0 Admittedly not being a SaaS expert, or an expert in building and housing a multi-tenant application, I\u2019ve found the…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_coblocks_attr":"","_coblocks_dimensions":"","_coblocks_responsive_height":"","_coblocks_accordion_ie_support":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[2,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-928","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-hr-technology","category-vendors"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/928","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=928"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/928\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=928"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=928"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=928"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}