Phil Wainewright: Multi-tenancy Benefits
Thursday, September 2, 2010 10:41 by dChengPhil Wainewright at ZDNet makes a wonderful case for multi-tenancy when it comes to modern SaaS applications.
The strength of multi-tenancy is that each of its multitude of individual tenants keeps it constantly evolving. This is in direct contrast to single tenancy, the whole point of which is to limit evolution only to those changes that are perceived to directly benefit the individual tenant. Thus single tenancy misses out on innovations and other advances that are being adopted by competitors, partners and third-party services.
He makes a great case especially in the collaborative aspects of the cloud. But not all multi-tenant architectures are the same.
One reason why single-tenancies still exist is that they are inherently more open to a wide range of users and they can all operate under a single configuration. This is ideal for collaboration. But that can be taken to its own limitations especially in regards to security, specialized processes and workflows, and unique information management.
As we see more business apps evolving into more social components, cloud application platforms are going to need to not only be multi-tenant, but also feature community tenancies.
You still want to maintain segmentation between companies (i.e. tenancies), but you also want to be able to leverage the greater user community as a whole.
Let’s take the federal government as an example. They might have a private cloud in which each department has their own focused tenant. This lets them keep their apps specialized for their own tasks, while also leverages a common architecture and any core apps. But they would also benefit from a bit of cross pollination. Exchanging ideas, working with partners, even internal workforce crowdsourcing. A community tenancy with those kind of applications in mind would be necessary.
So rather than use yet another platform for community apps, your cloud app platform should be ready to support both multi-tenant as well as community tenancies.
Eric Knipp says:
September 8th, 2010 at 8:42 pm
This is a great point, and it underscores something I talk about regularly with clients: the true value of cloud is not in its disruptiveness – which of course it is, in the classic Christiansen cost/value tradeoff – in the long run the value of cloud lies in the ability of the customer to “plug in” to the provider’s innovation curve.
The well-managed internal data center generally does a good job holding the line on cost and meeting a well-defined SLA. However, innovation is not part of the picture. The only innovation you will find occurs when a supplier rolls out a software upgrade.
In the cloud – whether it is on Longjump’s PaaS, Amazon’s IaaS or Workday’s SaaS – the access to innovation is seamless. We all evolve together, for better (hopefully) but sometimes for worse (stay tuned – Gartner doesn’t call it the Peak of Inflated Expectations for nothing). My expectation is that the “for better” outweighs the “for worse” and the enterprise’s marriage to the cloud becomes a long-lasting value.