868RA SaaS Enablement Platforms: Fast Path to Multi-tenancy or Lock-In?
Author: Mike West
As independent system vendor (ISV) migration to the Cloud continues, and as the many benefits of multi-tenancy have become clearer, Cloud platform providers have recently been touting better, faster, cheaper ways for the ISV application to become multi-tenant.
Established solutions from Salesforce and Microsoft provide a multi-tenant solution for applications written from the ground up. Microsoft also offers a virtualization solution on Azure that is not truly multi-tenant, as do many other providers in the market. Enablement offerings from Apprenda, Corent, GigaSpaces, and others, all promise a much quicker route to the Cloud for ISVs through a middleware platform for multi-tenancy. Oracle and Progress Software have solutions for their current ISVs that achieve multi-tenancy quickly, as well as new-build platforms for multi-tenant solutions.
However, as always, there are tradeoffs to each of these solutions. None of them is the holy grail – a truly plug-and-play middleware solution for instant multi-tenancy. ISVs will have to make imperfect choices to move to the Cloud, or else miss the market window.