I have (like many others) been part of several debates and conversations on why is multitenancy important for the cloud. Alok Misra posts an interesting article in Information World with a lot of valid reasons and certainly I agree with them.
Here is what I have to add -
I was recently on a call with Oracle and talking through the multitenancy capabilities of a SaaS product that I am consulting for. In that conversation and another conversation with a prospective enterprise customer, one thing became very clear -
A typical enterprise customer does not care whether you SaaS solution is multitenant or not. Actually, they probably rather hear that it is not, thus reducing some of the typical data security and segregation concerns. Based on this first hand experience, I am changing my marketing pitch as follows:
1. To Analysts, VC’s etc – Pitch multitenancy – they care a lot and will not necassiarly consider you a ”SaaS” solution unless you are multitenant.
2. To Enterprise Customers – Spend as close to 0 time in your sales pitch on multi-tenancy. Focus on the problem you are solving for them and how you will lower their costs; but not on multitenancy.
