Also think about shared product databases, most packaged product is barcoded. So instead of having to load up each product and set pricing one by one, what if other retailers have already loaded the same product, with description, photos, and supplier pricing into a shared catalogue? You scan the barcode, and the product adds itself.

There is a wide wide world of new possibilities for retailers once they can get into the cloud.

Disclaimer: I am the founder of VendHQ.com, launching publicly soon.

I’m not entirely sure if there are any vendors using this pricing model but I will investigate and let you know.

Thanks,

Matt

Can you please provide an example of the third pricing model? Havent found any vendors who use that model?

Thanks.

-Matt

I believe that we want to have as much control over our private information as possible. This excludes the millions of users on social networking sites, informing the details of their personal life along with their general preferences.

The flip side is would it be truly ethical that the data mined/analyzed from your customers be available to be sold? Regardless that the data would not contain names and contact details, it would still feel like a violation of private data.

Would your customers stick it out with you with an open mind, or would you more likely alienate the customers to look for another vendor? This is happening because legislators have not get in on the act, and how customers tend to ignore the privacy disclaimers, along with the terms of service.

Even Google with their technology is able to analyze the sites you visit and they would be able to customize ads specific to each user. This would be my personal opinion, but if Google started pushing ads in front of my face, and said, “Look we know you like this stuff, now go ahead and do yourself a favor and buy it!” I would not take the intrusion too likely, and would most likely use other alternate search engines.

Thanks for your comments. I’ll probably devote an entire blog entry to this topic soon. However, I can offer a little insight right now. By “multi-instance” I assume you are referring to an architecture where the same (or similar) schema is used with multiple instances of a database? In other words, each customer has its own database.

In my opinion, multi-tenant applications hold an advantage over multi-instance applications in the following ways:

1. You only have to upgrade a single database and code set
2. Data aggregation, data mining, and trend analysis are simplified if all customer data lies in a single database (data needs to be treated by vendors as an extremely valuable asset – more on this later)
3. Cheaper to host and maintain

I would not consider a multi-instance architecture SaaS because it’s not multi-tenant. You see, with a multi-tenant application you actually store all of your customers’ data in the same tables but you “attach” the data to each customer via a Customer ID or another identifier. In a multi-instance architecture you don’t need to have a Customer ID at all. While this certainly simplifies development, you lose all of your multi-tenancy benefits. Multi-tenancy DEFINES SaaS and is, in fact, the only real differentiator. Everything else is just a web application.

Question, how do you differentiate between a multitenant and a multi-instance architecture implementation and in your opinion is this considered a software as a service (SaaS) implementation, and why. Now this is not an easy nor simple question to respond to, I am interested in your thoughts around this topic. I look forward to hearing from you soon, and if interested, I have provided my Linkedin.com profile for your review, I look forward to your future postings and would enjoy an opportunity to discuss.

Kind regards,
Harold
972-464-1038
HaroldCHeardJr@Gmail.com

http://www.twitter.com/haroldcheardjr