For many, the question posed in this post is not a question at all.  Many are fully bought in to the concept of eCommerce applications (or at a bare minimum, services) existing only is a SaaS delivery model.  To be clear, there are many ISVs that deliver enterprise-class services that surround retailers’ eCommerce applications.  Tax, payments, Web analytics, product imagery, A/B testing, customer support, etc all represent areas where ISVs are already delivering solutions in a SaaS delivery model. 

The question posed in this entry however is more complex.  There are eCommerce application vendors today that deliver their applications in a hosted model, basically allowing retailers to offload expensive infrastructure.  There are an even smaller number of ISVs that deliver what most approximates true SaaS,  The key differentiator is the ability to “customize” the application and “own” the application so-to-speak. 

Given the economics of Retail at the moment, there is more than a groundswell of support for any opportunity to buy an eCommerce solution without buying the infrastructure that is traditionally required to actually run it.  Furthering this movement is the reality that eCommerce buying decisions are now more than ever being driven by business constituencies inside of Retail organizations. Marketing and merchandising executives are much more willing to focus on rapidly-delivered features and capabilities at the expense of technical control and integration.

But can there be a compromise between the business and IT organizations inside of Retail?  Can marketing and merchandising executives get a highly functional application, complete with workflows and features that allow them to have a pseudo turnkey solution while at the same time providing IT with a scalable, standards-based platform that can be developed on top of, integrated to, and supported?  Perhaps. 

The answer may be a set of componentized, commerce-specific services in the cloud that allow for basic assembly and sequencing into a true application architecture. 

More on this topic to come…