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Virtualization as Quick and Dirty SAAS
Phil Wainewright may belittle the approach, but it seems there is good reason that Workstream prefers virtualization to multi-tenancy.
The firm has seven reasons their customers would rather not move to a multitenancy platform (slightly paraphrased from the quote to make a nice ordered list:
- security and inappropriate data access,
- impact of other clients on their system performance,
- inability to establish and pay for their own, higher service levels (common among large companies),
- being forced into an upgrade,
- inability to support the level of client specific configurations and even customizations as necessary,
- inability to obtain client level user acceptance testing,
- inability to determine the precise production/go live dates for the system.
And virtualization via VMWare addresses these concerns:
VMWare allows us to deliver efficiencies much closer to multi tenancy by allowing for rapid and even automated creation of complete and identical new VM environments, full backups/snapshots of environments, easy upgrades across multiple environments, automated load balancing, etc.
To be fair, Wainewright only gives it a passing slap, talking about “enterprise IT types” preferring this approach to straight multitenant, hosted SAAS. Of course, in many of his posts he talks about the demise of enterprise IT, making this association quite the ”dis” to a familiar reader.
But I think Workstream is onto something: Virtualization has definite overhead per customer as compared with a single-instance, multi-tenant application, but as a fast, secure way to deliver to multiple customers without requiring major rewrites and simultaneously offering a great potential for customization, there is a lot of merit. Very interesting approach and one that many of us who deal with business customers would do well to take into consideration.