Multi tenancy with NAV 2013R2

davmac1

Hi,
I would like to hear from people actually using this for real businesses, and what types of benefits and issues they are having.

geordie

Lack of responses = no benefits? :-#

jglathe

:roll:

I wouldn't bet my business on this (especially 2013R2, but generally anything RTC) software... So...

Happy new year to everybody!

kriki

A company that does the bookkeeping for a lot of one-person companies. That company can have 1000's of one-person companies with very little changes to the standard Cronus (or with its own add-on for it).

Alex_Chow

There's no benefit for the customers. Only to a very small number of partners that offers their own hosted cloud solutions. I would imagine that SaasPlaza is very happy with this.

jglathe

Hi,

Alex Chow wrote:

I would imagine that SaasPlaza is very happy with this.

can someone from SaaSPlaza (or some other NAV hoster) please speak up here, then? Or is their business model so different from ours that they don't even read mibuso?

with best regards

Jens

davmac1

I have limited experience with SaaSplaza. In the situation I know, the customer has their own code base.
Is anyone actually using multi-tenancy right now or is it like Windows 8 Metro - an imposition designed to appeal to an almost non-existent market?

The primary reason for choosing NAV over its competitors is its ease of customization.

generic

They are going with "If you build it they will come" motto.
Hopefully it works out.

tinoruijs

kriki wrote:

A company that does the bookkeeping for a lot of one-person companies. That company can have 1000's of one-person companies with very little changes to the standard Cronus (or with its own add-on for it).

This offers great possibilities. However it is new for NAV so I guess it will take some time for partners to go on the market with a solution based on multitenancy.

David_Singleton

I am not sure if Navision partners are ready for the Multi Tenancy model. It is completely different way of doing business, and from what I see it is existing Navision partners looking to see how they can add this to their portfolio. I don't see this working. What I see is the slow evolution of a new type of partner that works exclusively on this model. OR Vertical oriented partners that will branch off a sub division or even a new company to sell the Vertical in a different market. But either way the cost to do the first implementation will be as much as a full fledged Navision implementation, in fact even more expensive because of the user manuals and training videos and standardization of the solution that is necessary, and the first customer might not even pay for 10% of that cost, so your first 10 clients will just reach the break even point and form then on the money will start to come in. Navision partners are very well known for their inherent fear of investment.

It is not Navision that is not ready for the SAAS/Multi Tennant model, it is the partners.

Of course this is all just my opinion and conjecture, ...

cnicola

David Singleton wrote:

I am not sure if Navision partners are ready for the Multi Tenancy model. It is completely different way of doing business, and from what I see it is existing Navision partners looking to see how they can add this to their portfolio. I don't see this working. What I see is the slow evolution of a new type of partner that works exclusively on this model. OR Vertical oriented partners that will branch off a sub division or even a new company to sell the Vertical in a different market. But either way the cost to do the first implementation will be as much as a full fledged Navision implementation, in fact even more expensive because of the user manuals and training videos and standardization of the solution that is necessary, and the first customer might not even pay for 10% of that cost, so your first 10 clients will just reach the break even point and form then on the money will start to come in. Navision partners are very well known for their inherent fear of investment.

It is not Navision that is not ready for the SAAS/Multi Tennant model, it is the partners.

Of course this is all just my opinion and conjecture, ...

Hi David,

The partners may not be ready (or may not want to be ready) because the old/current way used to make us money (and dare I say happy ? )
I personally don't relish the future of selling MS QuickBooks which this seems to be going towards.
But more importantly, I do not believe it will be easy to sell at lower end in volume due to other people having the same idea and already having implemented it. It is not like MS is known for being trailblazers. And the lower end the only thing that matters is price (and then built in functionality). And with MS, cloud providers and us trying to make money off same sale versus a company owning their entire product we can never win on price.
And in terms of functionality out of the box, there are products out there that offer everything we already have an more like standard native mobile client and many functional goodies.
So we are bringing a pencil to a gun fight ...

bteredesai

Hi

I am wondering whether multitenancy deployment can be used for global implementation.

By doing this can I achive that application objects are same across different installations, but separate database for each installations.

Any thoughts please.

Thanks,
Bhushan

Miklos_Hollender

@bteredesai no, you will need different localization objects and likely to a certain extent different customizations.

We actually tried the opposite, to merge multiple localizations into one database to save on licence costs. I guess if it would have been the countries with simple laws, like FR, DK, DE it would have worked, but one of them was Italy which as a HUGE localization due to complicated laws and it did not work well. Hunderds and hundreds of lines of the IF CompanyInfo."Localization" = CompanyInfo."Localization"::Italy THEN type of code. NOT nice. I will not carry it forward from the next upgrade, they are not using NAV for accounting anyway, local Italian accounting software is better at tracking the ever changing laws. So just order processing / logistics.

Miklos_Hollender

@cnicola - I always wondered how we are able to make sales at all. Local accounting packages usually offer far better functionality and are cheaper.

I think it has always been three things. Globality for international business. Brand name for the business who have something like an IT strategy and don't just randomly buy software but more like betting on a MS architecture. And using it pretty much as an dev environment for large add-ons.

Neither if these are relevant to the low-end market.

geordie

Edit

Miklos_Hollender

@geordie

But I am not really sure that is legal. Although Microsoft is thankfully not known for suing its own customers in the Dynamics range, still creative interpretations of the EULA are borderline risky. They told us using once licence over multiple companies is OK only if they are in the same database... and if you renumber localizations, it sounds like not only using different DBs but also not buying each localization (because if you buy them they put them all into once licence file, you upload that file into multiple DBs and no renumbering needed) so that is doubly risky.

I don't know risky these things actually are. I know there are people who get away with things like developing with a licence borrowed from a partner when they are freelancers or customers, or build external apps with reading NAV tables through SQL (according to EULA every user accessing data in a NAV tables needs licenced even if this way), but they can decide to play hardball about this any time.

I mean, look at what they did with Power Pivot. Everybody started using in Excel 2010 in whatever version they used, they upgraded to 2013, and realized now they can only use it if they get the Professional Plus version. Or Standalone. So Microsoft is playing pretty tough with this aspect of licencing recently.

bbrown

Miklos Hollender wrote:

@geordie

But I am not really sure that is legal. Although Microsoft is thankfully not known for suing its own customers in the Dynamics range, still creative interpretations of the EULA are borderline risky...

Modifications for the sole purpose of reducing the need to purchase licenses, are themselves violations of the EULA. That's rather standard with license agreements.