Just back from a nice long weekend trip (to anyone who has only seen the Grand Canyon from an airplane, you have to check it our up close)   - and returned to see that Oracle has announced a single tenant version of Siebel CRM OnDemand.

Good…

Some reading this will think Oracle is going backwards - that multi-tenancy is the most modern SaaS delivery model.

You’re wrong.

We have come a long way in terms of hosting components: grid infrastructures, virtualization, open source databases and operating systems, etc. All of these allow vendors to offer highly available, cost effective SaaS products without resorting to lumping everyone on to one big database.

(Though I do like the irony of Oracle moving to isolated model while Salesforce.com is stuck on a multi-tenant model using Oracle products.)

SAP, Oracle and others get it - multi-tenancy is not the ONLY way to do SaaS. In fact, it is not even one of the smartest ways, anymore.

SugarCRM’s Multi-Instance Architecture does borrow a lot from the multi-tenancy model. Lots of components are shared, but none that  actually affect the way a user experiences their version of the app for the most part. And like Oracle;s model, users of Sugar Enterprise On-Demand get a ton of extra customization and data/app isolation capabilities.