Tasos Christidis

Anybody who works or talks around Software as a Service (SaaS) has dealt (or, at least, come in contact) with the question “multi-tenant or single-tenant environment”. This question has become so common that one might think that there are just these two options. I would like to scrutinize on this issue: What alternatives are there when designing a SaaS environment, in terms of tenancy? Single-tenancy With this model the supplier sets up one complete environment for the client to use. By environment, I mean the application server, the database server and any other component that the application needs in order to be operational; excluding, of course, the network and some common network devices, firewalls etc. With this model, you have 10 servers with 10 OS’es, 10 application instances, 10 databases. You also have 1 rack (with a limited physical capacity, of course) and you are bound to set up the 2nd one, pretty soon! Single-tenancy, virtualized With this model the general architecture...

Having seen “the problem” of shifting tasks from inside the enterprise, to your co-operators, today I will propose “the solution”. The basic idea is to let these co-operators become part of your organization. Let them “in” . Let them become users of your application systems. Let them pull the information that they need instead of you working to push it to them. e-Business started with the basic idea a long time ago. And so, electronic shops were created. You can now go “inside” a million shops, browse through the products, order them, pay on-line and get on-time notifications about the status of your order. That was a real breakthrough. But it is not enough, because it stops that the final stage of the order. I think that we must have agreed so far that Sales is not the only function that your business is performing, right? How do you manage to give functionality to your co-operator, before the Sales Order and after that? Through a web portal that goes beyond the logic of the e-sho...