SaaS and the multiple degrees of multi-tenancy

Phil Wainewright writes astutely today on the many degrees of multi-tenant SaaS architecture, highlighting "true" vs. "everything else." Considering that customers and end-users have little to no idea what's running at SaaS companies it's a bit ironic that the technology powering these companies is interesting--I suppose it's only so to technical people and other vendors.

Salesforce.com: First-degree multi-tenancy. In this model, all customers are served from a single infrastructure in which every component is shared, all the way down to the tables in the database.

Intacct: Second-degree multi-tenancy. Like many SaaS pureplays, Intacct uses replication much more broadly than Salesforce.com to distribute its shared-schema instances across large numbers of server clusters.

Oracle and others: Lesser-degree multi-tenancy. There are a lot of terms floating around for these lower levels of multi-tenancy, including isolated tenancy, mega-tenancy or hybrid tenancy.

Link: Many degrees of multi-tenancy

[drjamesblake]

Many SaaS vendors are scared of revealing too much about their internal infrastructure for fear of competitors using that information. Vendors who do this most offer little competitive advantage because their infrastructure must be so easily copied or they may have something to hide.

At Mimecast we use our infrastructure as a competitive advantage and often take time to inform customers what the benefits of using our architecture for long-term email retention are (we are based on a parallel grid deployed as Software-as-a-Service) - scalability, performance, document format independence and low-fixed operational expense.

It is not just the techies, the advantages of doing things in a certain way can have distinct business advantages - after all SaaS vendors are increasingly selling direct to the business rather than the IT department.