The term "software multitenancy" refers to a software architecture in which a single instance of software runs on a server and serves multiple tenants. A tenant is a group of users who share a common access with specific privileges to the software instance. With a multitenant architecture, a software application is designed to provide every tenant a dedicated share of the instance - including its data, configuration, user management, tenant individual functionality and non-functional properties. Multitenancy contrasts with multi-instance architectures, where separate software instances operate on behalf of different tenants - wikipedia 
Some commentators regard multitenancy as an important feature of cloud computing.
# See also * Adoption * Economics of multitenancy life * Requirements * Virtualization * References