I came across this article today on Forbes. Dan Woods tries to dig a little deeper into what has made Salesforce.com so successful. In the end, Dan boils it down to the fact that Salesforce.com is not successfully solely because they were the first to provide multitenant software at a large scale. It was the fact that solved a critical problem most people overlooked. They made highly configurable enterprise software; one that could be configured intuitively without a computer science degree. By making multitenancy a constraint, it probably forced their engineers to build very malleable software that solves many of their customer’s problems right out of the box. It could also be the fact that they chose CRM software which requirements don’t vary drastically from company to company.

Either way, if a company made single tenant software that had superb usability and configure-ability; would it still garner the same success? I’ve said it before; software as a service is just that, a service. It doesn’t matter what architecture. As long as your customers don’t own and maintain the software or the hardware then that’s “service”. It doesn’t matter what flavor it comes in. This is one of those terms that the marketing department keeps hyping up to prove that there really is some innovation in their software. Because in this world, big words sell software. Don’t let a Suit with a degree in International Relations fool you next time. They’re wasting blog paper!