Lessons Learned in the Development of a CRM SaaS Solution

Abstract

Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions have gained a significant momentum in the past few years. They promise to vastly simplify the long way from identifying the need for a new software system until its successful operation at a customer. Essentially, SaaS solutions have to face two potentially conflicting requirements: On one hand, customers expect that the software they use in the cloud can be customized smoothly to solve their specific business needs and requirements. On the other hand, they need to exploit the economy of scale principle by employing an architecture that handles all customers uniformly. This article examines these and a number of other requirements to SaaS systems and will shed some light on architectural concepts addressing these requirements. It illustrates some of the concepts with examples from a Java based SaaS solution for customer relationship management (CRM) and provides some lessons learned gained during the development and the first few years of offering the product on the market.