Need for a SaaS Application Platform Similar to a J2EE Container

SaaS is the cutting-edge technology in the current product landscape. With an increase in the adoption of SaaS products by enterprises, more and more ISVs are trying the SaaS delivery channel. But, delivering a SaaS product cannot be considered as just a rebranding exercise of existing products. Products mostly have been architected, written, refined and customized over years with an underlying assumption that “an isolated runtime environment (i.e., isolated customer data and code execution environment) is available for each customer”. The current trend is to offer SaaS as a multi-tenanted product. This challenges the underlying assumption of the existing products. Architectures need to be re-thought to ensure that running the product in a non-isolated runtime environment for a customer does not introduce conflicts between different customer features. Moreover products have been created to scale for a single enterprise load. In a multi-tenanted environment, the same product needs to scale for a higher loads. In other words, existing products have been written as “Server Applications” and not “Cloud Applications.”

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