The Cloud strategy
Cloud deployment is more popular than ever. Nowadays, most enterprise applications are designed to run either on-premise or in the cloud. You can create an application that offers the same services to different clients, while isolating the client data from each other. There are several motivational factors behind this strategy and one of those is to save licensing costs. This is common when creating Software-as-a-Service (SaaS).
Licensing
In a cloud architecture, you only use and pay for the things that you need. You can create an application that only requires a database, and you don't need content management, image processing, message queuing, or other services. Even if you deploy on-premise, some vendors offer licensing models to enable features only if you pay for them.
Furthermore, some application servers and database vendors charge per instance or even per schema. You can use various techniques to reduce your cost so you don't have to pay the additional fee, one is...