Cloud Technology Re-evaluation: Insights from Retail IT Leaders

Ecommerce has matured in many important ways in the last decade.

Compared to where we are now, ecommerce was still in its infancy when I founded Jasper PIM—a SaaS-based product information management (PIM) platform—in 2006.

Commercial ecommerce platforms were really unsophisticated, so a lot of merchants were developing their own systems to solve their online shopping problems.

These days, the industry has consolidated and matured.

There are now great ecommerce platforms and related innovative technologies that seemed futuristic just a few years ago.

In fact, we’ve come so far that we’re starting to see the industry consolidate.

Some of the SaaS players are putting more unified solutions together, so merchants have better and better ecommerce platform options without having to make big investments.

New and exciting solutions are emerging all the time, so now I find that I spend a lot of my time educating large enterprise merchants on the most efficient ways to run their business and get the most out of ecommerce.

Many of our customers had big, sophisticated back-office systems such as:

• Oracle
• SAP
• MS Dynamics

These brands were used to being in control of on-premise solutions. And further, their IT departments wanted a certain amount of control.

Leadership certainly didn’t want to have what they perceived to be a dependency on siloed SaaS platforms.

But it’s a common misconception that you don’t have a lot of control on SaaS platforms.

The reality is that many of today’s SaaS platforms are equipped to handle extensive customization.

In fact, while on-premise platforms used to be the top choice for companies seeking customization and control, many are now switching to SaaS solutions to meet the majority of their business needs.

Let’s talk about why that is.