Hi, my name is Adam Gross. I'm from a company calledSalesforce.com and today I want to talk about one of the questions that comesup most frequently when I'm talking to people about new technology, which is ondemand and really understanding 'on demand.' Lots of different companies are usingthe word 'on demand' to describe a lot of different things, so when you want toknow what exactly they mean, it's important to keep two different concepts inmind.
The first is what's called 'single tenant' and you can thinkabout the difference just like you think the difference between buildings. Youhave single-family homes and you have apartment buildings. The second kind iscalled 'multi-tenant' and just like in real estate in 'single tenant ondemand,' each customer in each application gets their own dedicated stock,meaning they get their own dedicated hardware. They get their own dedicatedoperating system. They get their own dedicated application and as manycustomers as you have for that application, you'll see an entirely new stockcreator and each individual stack is going to resemble exactly the sameconfiguration that you have in your server room today except of course thatit's going to be running on a different site and you're going to be accessingit over the Internet.
In 'multi-tenant,' all customers of an application share onebig platform and a great example of the difference here is something likee-mail. In 'single tenant' on demand with e-mail, you're going to have your owndedicated stack, maybe you're running exchange server or something like that,that's going to be run exclusively for you. In 'multi-tenant' on demand, thisis something closer to what Yahoo offers with their e-mail service or Googleoffers with Gmail. And in that model, every customer is occupying the sameplatform, but just occupying the piece that they need so if you just need alittle bit of e-mail service you just take up that much room. If you have a lotof e-mail, you're able to dynamically expand to use as much space as required.The main difference then of course is deploying an entire new stack. An entirenew piece of infrastructure is not only going to cost a lot more than justprovisioning the tiny amount of virtual resources that you need, but of coursewhen it comes time for upgrades or maintenance each individual stack will needto be upgrade or maintained individually versus upgrading and maintaining thestack at once as you do with 'multi-tenant' on demand.
The exciting trend that's happening now is that not only areapplications like e-mail available in 'multi-tenant,' but increasinglyenterprise applications like (CRM) Customer Relationship Management and (ERP)Enterprise Resource Planning. Those kinds of applications are available in thesame model and what that means is the same kind of cost difference that you sawbetween traditional e-mail and 'multi-tenant' e-mail, we now see with thingslike 'multi-tenant' CRM and 'multi-tenant' ERP giving those up, making thoseapplications available much more effectively, much more inexpensively, and muchmore quickly than has been required in the old 'single tenant' on demand model.
So with that hopefully you have an understanding of the keyquestion you need to ask when the next person talks to you about 'on demand'which is, is it 'single tenant' or is it 'multi-tenant' and now you know thedifference.
