Study of Software as a Service Support Platform for Small and Medium Businesses

Software as a Serivce (SaaS) provides software application vendors a Web based delivery model to serve big amount of clients with multi-tenancy based infrastructure and application sharing architecture so as to get great benefit from the economy of scale. In this paper, we describe the evolution of the small and medium businesses (SMB) oriented SaaS ecosystem and its key challenges. On particular problem we focus on is how to leverage massive multi-tenancy to balance the cost-effectiveness achieved via high shared efficiency, and the consequent security, performance and availability isolation issues among tenants. Base on this foundation, we further study the concepts, competency model and enablement framework of customization and configuration in SaaS context to satisfy as may tenants' requirements as possible. We also explore the topics on service lifecycle and the subscription management design of SaaS.