Misinformed
@challisc: I'm afraid you have this wrong and either you've been misinformed or misunderstood what was said.
As of the July 2.5 release: each customer is a tenant with isolated data even within a dedicated DB schema. Each employee logs on to this dedicated tenant, gets assigned to a dispatcher and work process for the application server layer. That then connects to the central database instance/process. Otherwise it would not be multi-tenancy, as sharing of resources would not be possible. There is no 1:1 relationship between a customer and an assocaited database instance/process. Customers that do not want to participate in a multi-tenant environment can operate within their own walled garden but that's not new to SAP. That will have an end user cost implication, depending on the size of the organization.
For the purposes of scaling, each blade can hold 250 users (i.e. 10 low end customers at the 25-user benchmark) That number is set to double in the next 2 months or less. I expect to see further scaling economies achieved over time as SAP rolls out more of its 'HassoDB' in-memory technology into the BYD environment.
How do I know this? Because I've been having ongoing discussions with the technical architects at SAP since September 2007 when the product was first released to much dismay. Our last discussion was last Thursday and I expect further discussions in early course.
As an aside, these issues are why accurate due diligence is essential to a comparative understanding.
Useful clarification
Thanks Dennis. A useful insight.
The distinction between the application server layer and the central database instance/process was not mentioned that I can remember, as we hadn't yet talked at that depth. Presumably this means that the new multi-tenancy system is not as well "walled" as I first thought. But as you say the current completely walled approach will, I understand, continue to be available at a higher fee.
You’re right. It's certainly worth digging a bit deeper on these SaaS systems to find out what's really going on!
If you need
...access to the people who develop then I can likely help you there. Contact me privately.
mmm!
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Ian
OK, forget what I said above as I had not read the entire thread, Due Dilligence is important and if either of you wish to have a discussion about a New system we are launching which unfortuantely/fortuantely does a lot of what the SAP product does then please feel free to contact me.
Multi-tenancy
Talking to the technical director of a SAP Business ByDesign (BYD) reseller yesterday, I understand that general business functionality will be little changed in the new release, expected around August. The new release is primarily a "technical" release, including the new features mentioned.
In the current release, each customer has their own physical server. The new release includes a multi-tenancy option whereby each customer is separate [corrected, see subsequent comments], with the option to incorporate multiple companies within. This is different from the shared database approaches adopted by many SaaS players in accounting and other applications.