A Design of Two-tier SaaS Architecture Based on Group-tenant

In China, an increasing number of small and medium organizations have expressed interest in informatization. However, there are many challenges faced by software engineering practitioners, such as the numerous amount of entities, the scattered geographic location, and the lack of professionals and initial funding within these organizations. In this paper, a two-tier SaaS architecture based on group-tenant is proposed, providing a convenient solution for the problems. Therefore organizations, such as a key enterprise and its partners, are able to manage their own business, share information and minimize configuration of customization within the same SaaS application. We also design a complex data model that can satisfy unique requirements of group-tenant and two-tier configuration (extension). The case study explains how the target architecture of SaaS application would be developed and deployed by developers, and configured by group tenants.