SaaS Multi-tenant Application Customization

Cloud computing often uses the multi-tenancy architecture where tenants share system software. It is one of the key features of Software as a Service (SaaS) that enables higher profit margin by leveraging the economics of scale. Tenants residing on a multi-tenant application appear to be the sole owner of the application and not aware of the existence of others. A multi-tenant SaaS application accommodates each tenant's unique requirements by allowing tenant-level customization. A complex SaaS application that supports hundreds, even thousands of tenants could have hundreds of customization points with each of them providing multiple options, and this could result in a huge number of ways to customize the application. This paper proposes an innovative customization approach that studies similar tenants' customization choices and provides guided semi-automated customization process for the future tenants. A semi-automated customization process could enable tenants to quickly implement the customization that best suits their business needs.

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