OIC: Ontology-based intelligent customization framework for SaaS

Software as a Service (SaaS) with multi-tenancy architecture is a popular approach. To support a significant number of tenants, SaaS applications need be customizable to fulfill the various functional and quality requirements of individual tenants. This paper presents a unified and innovative multi-layered customization framework, to support and manage the variability of SaaS applications and tenants-specific requirements. Ontology is used to derive customization and deployment information for tenants cross layers. This framework also has an intelligent recommendation engine to support new tenants to deploy using information from existing deployed SaaS applications. A case study in mortgage application is used to demonstrate the proposed model.