A critical component of a Private Cloud 2.0 architecture is what Techcello call a ‘CMAP’ – A Cloud-ready Multi-tenant Application Platform.

They explain this in their white papers, where in essence it defines “Private SaaS” – Software as a service, within the enterprise.

In the same fashion that Private Cloud internalizes the IaaS model, so this can also be repeated for both the PaaS and SaaS layers too.

Indeed with virtualization well established it’s more so these areas where the enterprise will find the new opportunity growth areas for expanding IT productivity and ROI.

As Techcello explain with these layers targeting software developers more so than infrastructure managers, it’s helpful to first understand the evolutionary context of the work they do and how tools are created to help them, such as:

• 3GL vs 4GL programming models
• Component architectures and code generators
• Solution accelerators
• PaaS – Platform as a Service

Fundamentally in some way each of these sets out to improve the productivity of software developers, enabling them to create more code faster, and critically, that is also more reliable and easier to maintain.

Techcello explains that a CMAP brings together all of these aspects, where applications share common components via the multi-tenant architecture, so they are freed up to work on higher levels of business logic.

As this diagram explains these common components are the building blocks of SaaS that many developers take on when setting out to transformation their traditional app for the Cloud, such as:

• Tenant provisioning
• Authentication and authorization
• Licencing and Metering services
• Application Multi-tenancy & tenant data isolation

And so on.

This is lots of low-level ‘plumbing’ that software developers can easily lose considerable amounts of time trying to re-engineer over and over, so leveraging multi-tenant architecture components is a very smart strategy for Cloud-enabling apps.

The opportunity for enterprises is to define their own internal “SaaS stack” this way, which will bake their preferred enterprise standards into a reusable, approved reference architecture.

There is a hugely important strategic relationship between business success and this dynamic. The quicker an organization can adapt its’ IT systems to enable new ways of working, the quicker it can launch new products and achieve competitive advantage.

However factors such as their own procurement procedures and the inflexibility of the software they run will act as friction to slow this rate of change.

Private Cloud provides the automation tools for streamlining the procedures, and these new architectural approaches the design models that can similarly free up bottlenecks at the app development layers too.