PrimeObjects platform was designed to support both Multitenancy On-demand and On-premise architecture and deployment. PrimeObjects platform supports multitenancy from UI all the way down to the data level, it makes our solution more secure, reliable, flexible, scalable and elastic. 

Concept

Multitenancy refers to a principle in software architecture where a single instance of the software runs on a server, serving multiple client organizations (tenants). Multitenancy is contrasted with a multi-instance architecture where separate software instances (or hardware systems) are set up for different client organizations. With a multitenant architecture, a software application is designed to virtually partition its data and configuration, and each client organization works with a customized virtual application instance.

Economics of Multitenancy

The multitenancy architecture can be deployed by PrimeObjects Software Inc., PrimeObjects's ISVs and IT department of big sized customers who want to host their own multitenancy environment of PrimeObjects platform and business solutions.

Cost savings

Multitenancy allows for cost savings over and above the basic economies of scale achievable from consolidating IT resources into a single operation. An application instance usually incurs a certain amount of memory and processing overhead which can be substantial when multiplied by many customers, especially if the customers are small. Multitenancy reduces this overhead by amortizing it over many customers. Further cost savings may come from licensing costs of the underlying software (such as operating systems and database management systems). Put crudely, if you can run everything on a single software instance, you only have to buy one software license. The cost savings can be eclipsed by the difficulty of scaling the single instance (a bigger, faster server can only take one so far) as demand grows. In addition, development of multitenant systems is more complex, and security testing is more stringent.

Data aggregation/data mining

One of the most compelling reasons for vendors/ISVs to utilize multitenancy is for the inherent data aggregation benefits. Instead of collecting data from multiple data sources, with potentially different database schemas, all data for all customers is stored in a single database schema. Thus, running queries across customers, mining data, and looking for trends is much simpler. This reason is probably overhyped as one of the core multitenancy requirements is the need to prevent Service Provider access to customer (tenant) information. Further, it is common to separate the operational database from the mining database (usually because of different workload characteristics), thus weakening the argument even more. However for a big company who deploy multitenancy platform internally in their organization, they will for sure benefit from it without worrying about the concerns mentioned above.

Complexity

Because of the additional customization complexity and the need to maintain per-tenant metadata, multitenant applications require a larger development effort. But thanks to PrimeObjects Multitenancy Platform this kind of development effort has been reduced to minimum.

Release management

Multitenancy simplifies the release management process. In a traditional release management process, packages containing code and database changes are distributed to client desktop and/or server machines. These packages then have to be installed on each individual machine. With the multitenant model, the package typically only needs to be installed on a single server. This greatly simplifies the release management process.