Microsoft rewriting applications for hosted offerings

Microsoft is rewriting many of its applications to offer them in a hosted fashion, an executive said on Tuesday.

In order to efficiently host applications for customers, Microsoft must support multitenancy, which means that a hosted service provider can run one instance of the software, managing it as a single entity even though it serves multiple customers.

"One big fallacy is that you can take an application architected for one-to-few delivery and call it one-to-many," said Tim O'Brien, senior director of platform strategy for Microsoft, speaking to reporters at the software maker's headquarters in Redmond, Wash. Hosted software must be able to serve millions of customers, rather than the tens of thousands that most enterprise software is designed to support, he said.

Dynamics CRM is the first product that Microsoft has rearchitected for multitenancy, and to do so, the company had to fully rewrite the program, he said.

"We're not as far down the path of rearchitecting on the Exchange and SharePoint side, but that is directionally the way we're headed," he said. "We have a huge portfolio of applications that we'll over time take in this direction."

Rearchitecting the applications also involves being able to partition user content so that customers of hosted services can't access each other's content, he said. The hosted applications should also support high levels of configuration on the client side so that individual users can design user interfaces or presentation skins to suit them. Multitenancy also ensures that one customer can't take down the system for the others with a heavy usage load or a bad query, he said.

Microsoft is shifting its business from one that is mostly based on software to a business model based on software that works together with hosted services. In addition to redesigning its applications to support hosting, it also continues to build out large datacenters around the world to support service delivery.