PIM as a Service
The software industry’s evolution toward cloud computing and software as a service (SaaS) has changed how and where retail organizations operate not just their software, but their business. Almost every business application—across customer-facing functions, the office of finance and the supply chain—now operates in the cloud and is rented rather than purchased, locally installed and maintained. It is inevitable that every application that a retail organization uses eventually will be available in the cloud, to the point where “the cloud” will be no more consequential than “the network” is today. The current situation gives retailers the opportunity to explore this approach and assess the advantages it offers for business and IT..
Over the last decade retailers have increasingly opted to use software as a service. Sometimes they make this decision to be able to transition to the latest software more easily and other times because it is the only way to deploy the software they have selected. This move to the cloud gets retail organizations, and particularly their IT staffs, out of the business of managing software deployments and reduces the risk of stagnant software, which impedes effective business processes. Software as a service also helps retail organizations minimize risk and better respond to scale and growth needs because the deployment is managed by a vendor committed to a service-level agreement (SLA).