LiveTime Multi-tenancy for Service providers

Multi-tenancy describes a technique or architecture for delivering software to multiple customers, or organizations, most commonly for Software as a Service. Application Service Providers (ASP’s) use tenancy to separate data between clients and provide service across multiple corporations.

LiveTime uses a multi-instance architecture to provide true data separation between corporations. LiveTime’s lightweight architecture means that there is very low overhead in bringing up new instances. These may be deployed in multiple environments, from a shared JVM instance through to Zones and full virtualized environments. The choice is left up to the service provider and depends upon the level of separation desired. This is in contrast to other SaaS providers such as Salesforce.com and Microsoft where users share the same application and database.

The advantage of the LiveTime approach is that each corporation can be managed independently and provide greater resiliency and protection from downtime, as well as protection from data co-mingling and other security concerns.

In addition, because LiveTime uses a distributed application model, all services are replicated at the application level rather than using a single point of failure in a shared services model. This allows LiveTime to scale very quickly and use redundant arrays of inexpensive computers (RAIC), rather than the heavy iron necessary for single shared applications.

Leveraged Resources

Shared service providers often leverage resources across multiple clients. In this situation multiple LiveTime instances can be used to deliver a consolidated work queue through RSS feeds. Simply clicking the appropriate request will automatically sign technicians into the correct instance, no matter where it is located and manage the call as usual. This also allows unique customization for each client, including customized portals, CMDB design and knowledge center.

Integration

The multi-instance model is particularly useful in the ITIL Service Management industry where the application needs to communicate with a number of other enterprise systems, either in the cloud or within the corporate network. Data separation is crucial in these environments where LiveTime is communicating with Live data feeds from asset management and discovery systems, customer databases, authentication servers and even web services to other service management products.