A Novel Model Supporting Customization Sharing in SaaS Applications

In SaaS model, a single instance of a SaaS application can serve multiple tenants who have different specific business needs. In many cases a tenant demands to customize with a SaaS application out of more than one virtualized application and run multiple business applications simultaneously, and moreover these different business applications have many common customization features. According to the traditional way, the tenant performs customization separately for different business applications, which brings about many repeated custom operations and much duplication of custom metadata. In this paper, we propose a novel multi-level customization model for SaaS applications which supports customization sharing among different virtualized applications in a tenant area. And then we design a metadata-driven schema-sharing multi-tenant data storage architecture which implements multi-level customization model. This paper also presents an experimental comparison of the new strategy with the old approach.