Building a Multi Tenant Application is way complex and different than building Single Tenant Solutions and this requires a solid understanding and skills towards designing scalable architecture. It is proven that shared multi tenancy is the best approach to reduce the overall TCO, and facilitates continuous enhancements and helps converting innovative ideas into new features and products.  Markets are getting tougher and becoming more crowded with many competitors venturing into SaaS model and flooding with low cost products. As a result ISV vendors are forced to offer more for less, i.e. Superior high quality features with lower cost. ISVs are in search of the latest tools, technologies and resources that can help them to lower the overall cost and development time and provide superior services to the customers.
Product vendors are increasingly adopting practices and methodologies which could help them reach the market with best in class products with fewer investments. Lean product development is one among those methodologies adopted by ISVs to lower the total cost of the product.

The primary principles are,

1. Less Time
2. Less Resource
3. Less Cost
4. Less Rework
5. More Features

Less Time

“Conceive Quickly, Build quicker and Commercialize Rapidly”.  Being an early bird can help you get food faster, similarly being a trend setter in a specific product or domain can have a great impact on your revenue, so reaching the market with the correct product at the correct time would always make you a pioneer. Pick best in class solutions, technology and quality tools that can speed up the development. Utilizing the proven, tested, off the shelf available components can reduce the overall cost as well as speed up the development time and go to market faster.

Less Resource

It is impossible to build a quality product without having qualified resources. Especially, to build a multi tenant on-demand SaaS application requires an expert team with prior experience in building products for the cloud. ISVs and new Product builders have to really spend more time and effort fishing for experts who have real expertise in building SaaS products.Along this line, ISVs can also leverage robust and extendible framework such as Cello which is a proven technology stack to build high quality configurable, robust, scalable and reliable application with its SOA based extendible architecture. In fact, the framework can actually substitute the need of highly skilled architects and well experienced resources for laying the base foundation for constructing the business functionalities.

Less Cost

A SaaS ROI calculator shows that, building non functional requirements of any SaaS application such as Tenant/Customer Management, Subscription management, Metering & billing, Security Framework, Theming Support, Configurations etc. [Click here to view the full list] is consumed considerable i.e. 30 – 50% amount of the total time and effort in building these components from the ground up. Potentially it delays so much of time in reaching the market, again any design problems or bugs can delay the development time even further. Careful evaluations are required in order to identify a better approach whether to go with off the shelf available options such as techcello or to build the entire stack from scratch by yourself.

Less Rework

Rework of any sort is strictly not allowed in Lean product development. Design, Build, Test and Document for only what is required for the product for the next cycles because the effort that is spent on a feature which is only required after 1 year is just equivalent to wasting time and effort now, because during this time gap the business requirement might change or there might be some new technology would have evolved which could actually replace the thousand lines of code that you have written. Similarly designing complex features such as end user configurable workflows or business rules need real thought process and skills, getting wrong approaches or practice can lead to a lot of rework.

More Features

Adaptability for the changing business is one of the key non functional requirements of any application i.e. The application architecture has to be resilient adoptable and extendible to technologies for continuously enhancing and maintaining the application which is the core of the ever changing business world. More and more features have to be delivered as much as quickly and possibly which could add more values to the end customers.

Cello promotes the Lean development methodology to build the business specific functionalities and features by strictly following all the basic principles of Lean product development. Cello, a Multi Tenant application development framework helps the product makers to reduce the overall development time and effort by bringing together all the non functional components required for building High Quality Multi Tenant Applications quicker. With Cello framework, the developers get more room to concentrate on editing and developing newer features, because adding and enhancing the features of the product is very important to maintain the customer base as well to woo new customers.