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While researching a previous post on multi-tenancy, one of the fundamentals of Software as a Service (SaaS) and cloud computing architectures, I came across a company called Apprenda, Inc., that aims to provide software infrastructure that other software vendors, and in some cases enterprises, can leverage.
I haven't had a chance to fully check them out, so what follows is mostly based on a briefing from their Director of Business Development Jesse Kliza.
But the Apprenda approach makes a lot of sense, assuming it works as described.
Basically, their story is that the founders set up the company in 2005, originally intending to create a help desk offering that would be marketed as a SaaS product, meaning that access to it would be sold by subscription over the web. In the process, they spent so much time addressing fundamental issues such as multi-tenancy, and figuring out how to meter and charge for different levels of functionality, that they decided a better goal would be to build a platform that would help other vendors adapt their software to this environment.
Just as software vendors got a boost when operating systems began to take over more and more basic tasks, such as controlling interaction with file systems, monitors, and printers (tasks early software vendors had to tackle themselves), SaaS vendors can get a leg up from the quasi-OS Apprenda has created to deal with messy details like how to partition a single database so that it can manage the records of many customers, and keep their data separate.
Salesforce.com is also sharing what it has learned about building SaaS applications through its Force.com platform for ISVs, but one difference is that the applications have to be written specifically for that environment. Apprenda is targeting the large body of ISVs who have built their applications on the Microsoft.NET platform. And rather than host the applications on its own network, Apprenda is partnering with Internet hosting companies who provide the actual data center infrastructure.
Apprenda provides a software development kit, which includes a plug-in to Microsoft Visual Studio. ISVs design and test their applications as if for a single-tenancy (one application instance, one physically separate database). The plug in allows them to mark up their code so that functions or components that are going to be provisioned or metered differently for different customers can be configured within the Apprenda environment. They then save the application code and database definitions to an archive and upload it into the hosting environment.
A key claim, which I don't claim to have verified, is that the Apprenda environment can automatically refactor database code to inject all that multi-tenant goodness a SaaS application should have into the application, so that access to data always passes through a wrapper that will enforce the relevant rights and security rules.
That style of database partitioning, which many SaaS visionaries see as essential to the economic deliver of software services, is actually an option. Vendors who think their customers will demand a physically separate database can also choose that option prior to deployment. And deferring that choice until deployment time -- by designing the database as if it would be run in stand-alone mode, rather than explicitly designing for multi-tenancy -- is one of the advantages of the Apprenda environment because it offers greater flexibility, Kliza said.
In addition to providing access to this system through hosting providers, Apprenda says it is also talking to some large software vendors who own their own data centers about licensing the technology.
And Kliza said Apprenda is also talking to some enterprises, such as one large financial services firm, that are interested in licensing the technology for their own purposes. "I wouldn't want to say we were surprised, but in some ways we were," Kliza said, because that's not the market his firm was aiming for.
But given how many types of business relationships are being driven to the web, it makes perfect sense to me that some enterprises would at least be interested in exploring whether the architecture Apprenda has devised can be adapted to strengthen the applications they offer to their customers and business partners.
I'd love to hear from anyone who has hands-on experience working with the Apprenda solution:
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