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ISV to Host an App and Sell like typical SaaS

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Posted on by davidyc

As an ISV, I would like to run a single production instance of a Model Driven App (MDA) in an Azure tenant which is dedicated to the hosting of this MDA, and uses the Azure AD B2B (and external identity management) to effectively manage access and usage of the MDA (like any other SaaS product e.g. Xero.com or Monday.com).

The reasons for this approach are:

my app requires extensive usage of the dataverse web api, which means system admin azure ad access for any environment for onboarding,
numerous third party APIs are used in the MDA where the commercial agreement is held by us as the ISV
the requirement for real-time and high volume data transfer between end users and ISV are inefficient over API (not to mention the permissions and config to securely transmit data back to the ISV) - this data need is commercial not relating to app monitoring/performance/error logs/licensing as I understand this can be managed through ISV studio.

I realise that the Microsoft recommended approach for ISVs is to publish via AppSource, however I feel there is a place for an ISV to have a set up as detailed above.

I'm interested to hear from anyone with a good understanding of PowerApps and Azure AD B2B / External Identities to comment on this approach?

Categories:

Power Apps Pro Dev & ISV

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cchannon 4,702 Moderator on at

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Well, it is certainly a cool idea, though I don't know anyone that has done it.

I'd expect a few headaches along the way:

MSFT licensing might have constraints on this. They might be willing to do it if you register as a VAR, but otherwise it can be very difficult to buy licenses "on behalf of" a different organization.

Licensing B2B identities for Power Platform is definitely supported, but there are limitations. There are some first-party Dynamics apps they can't use (you probably don't care about that) and they can't use Outlook integration or send emails from your tenant (because their B2B identity doesn't actually have an email address) - that one might be more of an issue for you.

Customer tailoring and customization needs would be a big concern for me. If you expect to never customize for any of your users, then your scalability should be great, but if you expect to make even modest business logic or data model changes for each customer, then you will quickly get buried under a mountain of technical debt and regression testing. You could mitigate this by having a single production tenant and multiple customer environments but this would either mean a duplication of that 3rd party data you mentioned, or you'd have to shear that data off into a shared store of some kind and read it from each customer environment with Virtual Entities or another similar solution.

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CR-23072234-0 30 on at

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Hi David,

Did you have any success with deploying this type of Saas offering? We are looking into something similar and would like to know if you found a deployment architecture that works.

Thanks

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bsm 4 on at

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Did you find a solution?

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CR-23072234-0 30 on at

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We are probably going with a Global Multitenant Setup as outlined in the Success by Design Implementation Guide and treating our "customers" as independent subsidiaries.
mslearn-developer-tools-power-platform/fasttrack/Dynamics 365 Success by Design Implementation Guide v1-3-1-compressed.pdf at master · MicrosoftDocs/mslearn-developer-tools-power-platform · GitHub

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