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Copyright 2013 TechVentive, Inc., All Rights Reserved - Unauthorized reproduction, storage, transmission or quotation strictly prohibited. 2 The Multi-tenant Advantage? "In a study completed by TechVentive involving users of multi-tenant application software, customers reported saving between 40-60% by using multi-tenant solutions instead of on-premises applications." Source: SaaS: Now Serving Large, Complex Enterprises, Vital Analysis, June 2010 Different Deployment Methods Accounting application software has undergone a revolution in recent years. Once restricted to on- premises solutions, now software buyers have several new deployment methods available to them. What comes with these different deployment choices are differences in up-front costs, maintenance costs and more. The long-standing deployment method, on-premises, requires you to install a vendor's software on your computer hardware. Your firm would then need additional software products to make it work. These additional products include database software, backup and recovery tools, reporting tools, systems management software and more. All of this, the hardware, systems software, etc. requires significant upfront licenses or other capital expenditures. Systems integrators or resellers are often enlisted to implement these products. Additionally, continued usage or support of these solution components requires annual maintenance fees, incremental licenses, maintenance price increases and possibly other cash outlays. On-premises software users also must maintain the applications they license. Upon receipt of a new upgrade, patches or release software, the customer must choose a time to implement these changes. This maintenance activity is often problematic because the customers' computing environment may not match that of the software vendor's environment. Significant testing may be needed just to get the upgrade installed and working. Additional work may be required to re-apply any of the customer's modifications and to ensure existing interfaces continue to work as planned. A best practice many customers use during this maintenance activity is regression testing. Regression testing is a disciplined process that ensures that new programming changes have not adversely impacted the prior code. In recent years, additional deployment options have arisen. Several on-premises vendors created "hosted" versions of their product. Essentially, the application software is resident on either the vendor's or a third-party's cloud server. These solutions are generally offered on a SaaS (Software-as-a- Service) basis. SaaS solutions can be offered via monthly subscriptions as opposed to upfront license costs and annual maintenance support fees. Using the hosted SaaS deployment model, customers can avoid large upfront capital expenditures because costs can be paid monthly out of the user's operating budget. Customers in this model are often on the hook to select the timing and frequency of when they upgrade, maintain and patch the software. In some cases, the hosting firm/reseller does this (for a fee), but in other situations, the customer must do so. Either way, the cost to upgrade is borne by the customer.

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