Multi-tenancy for Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2013 R2 addresses new partner opportunities

With the release of Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2013 R2, one of the topics of discussion this autumn has been the newly supported multi-tenant architecture. 

Multi-tenancy is a principle in software architecture where a single instance of the application runs on a server (or group of servers) and serves multiple clients or tenants. Multi-tenant hosting for Dynamics NAV 2013 R2 is available to be run on both Azure cloud and partner-hosted deployments.

How the NAV architecture has evolved since 2009 | Source

But it's important to note that multi-tenancy is not expected to be a common deployment approach for NAV customers.

"Multi-tenancy is optional," said Freddy Kristiansen, a Dynamics NAV software architect with Microsoft, in his session at last week's NAV Tech Days event in Antwerp (recording can be found here). "NAV is still capable of running single tenancy exactly as it was before and Microsoft doesn't have any plans to change it."

Kristiansen explained that multi-tenancy for NAV isn't intended to be used with traditional Dynamics NAV installations, whether hosted or on-premises because the majority of those installations have customizations and add-ons.

"Multi-tenancy is all about having a lot of customers running the same application," he said. "It's targeted at giving partners the opportunity to pursue new and repeatable business in the cloud where their customers can sign up for a hosted solution based on NAV, ...