An end-to-end methodology and toolkit for fine granularity SaaS-ization

Abstract

Software as a Service (SaaS) is an important technology innovation as well as a business model innovation to bring new opportunities to Small and Medium Enterprises (SME). There are different SaaS provisioning methods, depending on the customer profile, the cost of the required resources, and the price that customers are willing to pay. The core technology of SaaS-ization focuses on multi-tenancy, which means supporting multiple customers over the SaaS platform at the same time. In this paper, we describe an end-to-end methodology, together with a toolkit that supports the fine granularity multi-tenancy mechanism. This means using one single application instance to support multiple tenants, an approach that could save the Cloud infrastructure resources required to support high volumes of customers. Further, the methodology could lower the entry level of SaaS operators, as well as the user subscription fees. © 2009 IEEE.