
Force.com is based on a multitenant architecture that makes it more secure, reliable, and elastic than just about anything else on the market. Nearly 60,000 customers run on a massively shared infrastructure, which creates economies of scale not possible with single-tenant applications, whether they’re hosted on premises or with an ASP.
In a single-tenant environment, every new stack must be separately provisioned, managed, and scaled. In a multitenant environment, you can quickly, easily, and cost-effectively create development, test, staging, training, and production environments with just a few clicks.
Single-tenancy has dis-economies of scale. As the application load grows, the provider has to spend more time and money adding infrastructure and less time focusing on delivering new applications. In a multitenant environment, costs decrease as usage grows, letting the service provider invest in innovation and customer success.
In our multitenant, cloud-based service, the development team can see which capabilities customers are using, both in real time and historically. The team can also see how customers actually use the application: What are common tasks, for example, and how many clicks does it take to carry out those tasks? This insight lets the developers consistently deliver a world-class user experience with capabilities that customers actually need and will use.
Because we can see how customers are actually using the application, we can understand which customers are most successful. By discovering how those customers use the application, we can then turn these lessons into best practices for the community.