As our industry continues its ongoing shift to the Cloud, one decision that many vendors are facing is whether to continue selling a dedicated solution or upgrade to multi-tenancy.
Multi-tenancy is a type of architecture where one single instance of your software and its infrastructure supports multiple customers (tenants). True MT solutions are only available in the Cloud.
Similar to housing, a dedicated solution is like owning a home – the whole thing is yours to occupy, finance, and maintain. A multi-tenant solution is like an apartment or townhouse that has a rented space in a shared structure.
Both scenarios have benefits and drawbacks. Owning a home may seem ideal, unless you are tired of being responsible when things inevitably break, are concerned about intruders, and wish you did not have to shovel your driveway on those cold winter mornings. In the same way, real-estate agents may crave the consistency of collecting monthly rent checks rather than always chasing the next big sale.
Getting back to technology, the benefits of multi-tenancy can be summarized in three big categories:
1. LOWER COSTS
Multi-tenant architecture is more cost-effective for both the vendor and the customer.
For the reseller: On your end, you need only to develop, maintain, and support one solution to serve all of your customers. This will be less expensive than selling and supporting multiple dedicated servers and solutions.
For the user: Consumers like the multi-tenant pricing model of paying a set monthly subscription rather than a hefty up-front investment and unexpected bills down the line. There are no hardware or maintenance costs and they do not require IT expertise on-site.
Sharing the financial burden is a benefit to all parties involved.
2. MORE FLEXIBILITY
Despite the lower costs, multi-tenant architecture actually opens up more possibilities than a dedicated solution.
For the reseller: As a vendor, having all of your users on one instance makes it easy to customize individual preferences. Your MT interface will put all users in one place so it is quick and easy to add or remove customers, select the features one individual wants, or change the number of seats for another. Experience has shown us that selling dedicated platforms can lead to growth, but the work involved will become too much to manage. The scalability of multi-tenancy is the key to sustainable growth.
For the user: Your customers will love the flexibility offered to them as well. Rather than buying a one-size-fits-all solution with some features they do not really need and missing others that they want, they can pick and choose what to include in their solution and pay accordingly.
3. LESS WORK
Cutting out busywork and saving time is a top priority in our busy industry. Multi-tenant architecture does both.
For the reseller: Selling multi-tenancy is extremely easy. On-boarding new customers is quick and simple. Once you have your software instance and first customer set-up, adding new users will be mostly automated. The process will be the same for each customer and takes little more than a few clicks of your mouse. In the same way, software updates and upgrades can be done one time for all users. Forget the days of lengthy set-ups and updates for each and every user. Leave that headache in the past.
For the user: Your multi-tenant customers will enjoy less busywork as well. They do not have to worry about any: installations, maintenance, support, upgrades, or security. You will take care of all of those things, so they are free to focus on running their business.
Ready to upgrade to a multi-tenant solution?
Our Multi-Tenant PBX gives Telecom Service Providers a powerful platform to serve the IP PBX market in the cloud as a VoIP switch. Unlimited Hosted IP PBX Multi-Tenants, Unlimited resellers, user/company self-portal, and LCR are just some of the advanced features included with desktop applications to support. The system may be used as a Class 4 or Class 5 softswitch/voipswitch with multi-tenancy architecture. Learn more about Multi-Tenant PBX here or contact us today.
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