Versioning and SaaS

[rbr]

Hello,

I work for a large corporation 30k+ employees that has a SaaS offering
with approximately 1.5M+ users on the system on any given day. We have
had several of our clients request that we start versioning our
product and offing it in concurrent environments. This, obviously,
provides many hurdles however, we feel like we are at the point we can
pull it off.

My question to the group is, what is your opinion of versioning in
SaaS? Obviously, you will always have versions as fixes are made and
new features are put in place. However, from what I have seen, the
typical approach is to release the new version and let the client deal
with the changes. In our environment, this becomes more difficult due
to some minor, but sometimes costly, integration concerns. This is why
it has been requested that we offer multiple versions (only versions
that include "breaking: changes or Major.Minor versions) running
simultaneously.

This whole issue however, has created quite a rift within our
organization. Development and product want this, production IT/IS, SCM
and release management do not.

What is your opinion and how have you seen this done in the future
(Whether with concurrent versions or not).

TIA!

rbr