Our architecture is startlingly different, even for On Demand software.   We question how things were done before and how they will be done in the future – this is the basis of our innovation.  We challenged the concept that On Demand software had to be multi-tenant based – and proved there is a better way. 

Traditional enterprise On Demand multi-tenant architectures were designed to reduce vendor management and maintenance costs.  In theory, multi-tenancy would help the vendor’s business scale.  But at what cost to the customer?  Virtualization, cheaper hardware costs, Open Source, and new platform technologies have allowed for a shift in the way On Demand software is delivered. 

At Service-now.com, we provide our customers with their own set of applications and databases as part of our Data and Code Isolation strategy.  We believe our customer's data should be completely isolated from other customer instances - and our customers unanimously agree.  Each Service-now.com instance runs under a separate Java Virtual Machine accessing a separate relational database.  Based on our experience, we found that our Data and Code Isolation strategy enables:

• Elevated customer security by not mixing customer data in a single database
• Greater scalability - supporting the world's largest organizations
• Much faster response times
• Extensive application customization (which is always preserved through upgrades)
• Allows us to deliver the best price to our customers due to management simplicity

At the instance level, Service-now.com is architected to support multi-tenant deployments allowing customer data, workflow, customizations, views and roles to be segregated.  Our approach is ideal for our Managed Service Provider partners – providing ultimate flexibility in fulfilling customer requirements. 

Additionally, we provide our customers and service provider partners the choice to deploy Service-now.com on premise.  The same On Demand architectural philosophies are implemented in on premise deployments – auto-upgrades, preserved customizations, secure connections, application security, and multi-tenancy.

For additional information on our system and its general architecture, please see our Wiki.