Support and sustained engineering:  

The previous articles talked about Licensing and purchasing models. This article talks about support and sustained engineering.

Sustaining engineering for multitenant applications is about maintenance after release hence ‘sustaining’ in the way tenants and customers use these and provide feedback with their usage. The difference between sustaining engineering for a software product versus a multitenant application is one of on-premises deployment versus software-as-a-service. Nevertheless, the company that makes the software product is focused on innovations and improved valued additions that come in waves of software releases to tenants. While many are seamlessly upgraded to the newer versions since they have no ownership of the infrastructure, solution providers cannot always guarantee backward compatibility and the resources they provision might themselves not be supported in the same way as they were. These and other external dependencies are often addressed with releases which are versioned to indicate which is older and which is newer. The older versions are upgraded to the newer on existing systems or the newer versions are installed on newer systems. As the software maker focuses on the next release, sustaining engineers focus on maintaining the existing released versions for specific tenant usages.   

The typical rule of thumb for how many versions to maintain is usually determined based on the usages by customers. Some companies maintain all their application versions as far back as the earliest if there are customers who have purchased them and want to actively use them. Others choose to discontinue the maintenance on select older versions so long as both the customers and the company have an agreed exit strategy. Usually, the customers may be eased into newer versions. There are several factors that play out into the extent of maintenance engaged by a software maker such as revenue, customer base, market segment, costs, resources, media, etc. and it is not uncommon to find two or three versions being maintained.  Sustaining is all about this art and science of maintaining released software versions and often engages with customers throughout their usages. It is interesting to note that customers can run into issues of their own accord with any of these versions and not just when the software maker has put out a release the customer wants to use. That is why software sales and sustaining are both ongoing commitments for a software maker while being fundamentally different. 

Nowhere in the industry has there been a better service-level agreement articulation as the warranty and support that comes with the application both for the multitenant application and those applications that are sold via the application store. This is not just legal language. It is one where the software maker is offering a tiered approach to what the customer has paid for and is required to pay for.  

On one end of the spectrum, early multitenant applications have long held on to a difficult bargain for the customer where they were required to pay for the updates and upgrades to their purchases so that their operations could continue without outages. Large commercial multitenant applications even had a wake-up call from the industry to say that this simply cannot go on and there must be resources pitched in to improve the efficiency and experience around the engagement. 

On the other end of the spectrum, cloud service and outsourced business processes have largely muted the discussions on software maintenance with most error data gathering activities and corrections happening independent of the businesses concern. Even the billing has changed to being all-inclusive in the pay as you go approach with the clouds taking over the total cost of ownership and leaving merely the application optimizations to the businesses. 

Somewhere in between, the industry is required to balance and invest in such agreements across and the applications that they use. The maintenance plan and support are drawn out by the multitenant solution providers to best suit their customers and internal schedule.