The ABCs of Enterprise Commerce: These 5 Acronyms Can Help Guide Your Selection Process

Let’s face it: the tech world is full of acronyms and complex jargon that often alienate IT staff from the rest of a corporation’s core business functions. Unfortunately, this can leave key influencers out of critical conversations around selection criteria for enterprise commerce decisions.

We’ve unpacked five acronym categories that can do just the opposite: provide a brief overview of factors your team should consider when evaluating potential enterprise commerce partners and platforms.

1. B2B, D2C, B2C:
Given your business model, what enterprise commerce platform works best for you?

What kinds of customers will your enterprise commerce platform need to serve? Are you a B2B/D2C business seeking to manage account data to track long-term customer relationships for each sale, or do you serve consumers (B2C) and are primarily focused on the speed of orders and transactional data between buyer and seller?

Your platform should be designed to serve your business model type, and not retroactively pieced into fitting your company’s primary needs.

2. CPQ, OMS (etc!):
What enterprise business functions do you need your platform to support?

Of course, in addition to serving your commerce function, an enterprise commerce platform must also provide solutions for your entire, well, enterprise.

Here’s where the acronyms can really take off, but knowing the value behind them can really bring a team together.

Does your company need a better way to let customers customize their products and see real-time pricing as they go? Look for an advanced CPQ or Configure Price Quote function.

Frustrated by cookie-cutter ordering processes with no flexibility or prioritization rules among customers or regions? Compare OMS or Order Management Systems.

Sales teams can be especially helpful by providing valuable feedback to IT departments, including personal insight, broader questions and even pain points they hear from their customers.

In fact, our vast experience overcoming these pain points across large companies actually led to the creation of viax.io itself. It was this commitment to find a better way to serve clients and become an agent of change that we developed building block modules that integrate natively with each other and seamlessly with other systems to reimagine enterprise commerce.

3. SaaS, IaaS or PaaS:
Which software delivery model is the right fit for your corporation?

Most of today's enterprise commerce solutions are cloud-based; however, a few different service models exist, each of which has its own pros and cons worth reviewing. 

• Software as a Service (SaaS) allows companies to access on-demand data from any web-enabled device in exchange for a monthly or annual subscription fee. SaaS vendors host and maintain databases and application code. With no hardware or infrastructure to support, start-up and maintenance costs are controlled. On the downside, customers should be aware that SaaS vendors will likely host multiple clients on a server, so security and reliability could be a serious concern. Having a vendor maintaining your databases can also be a double-edged sword — while this might provide upfront ease, it also foregoes much internal control.
• Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is the collection of hardware and software infrastructure that a cloud provider offers organizations and delivers via virtualization technology. It provides support for companies to manage servers, networking, operating systems, databases and storage. The provider manages and maintains the infrastructure, while the client maintains strong internal control. Subscription fees could be substantial over the long-run, having some clients consider building such infrastructure in-house, rather than paying the subscription fee for IaaS. Set-ups for integration with IaaS systems can also be time-consuming, both upfront and ongoing, as clients manage their own upgrades.
• Platform as a Service (PaaS) delivers a platform to clients that enables clients to develop, run and manage their own business applications without the need to build or maintain infrastructure that these software development processes typically require. Instead, a PaaS provider offers such services via cloud infrastructure. It’s subscription model creates the most flexibility and control for clients and developers while removing the investment time and cost of building an in-house platform. The PaaS environment is conducive to fast testing and implementation, leading to faster time to market with a more robust platform. Cautions with some PaaS platforms: Be wary of those that cannot scale to meet your business’s changing needs or those for whom cloud compatibility or customizing the APIs is complicated. With viax PaaS, businesses scale at their own pace via building block modules, described above, with all implementations on the front-end running seamlessly with uninterrupted service since viax deployments are done with zero downtime. viax also offers all-inclusive subscriptions and predictable pricing, so there are never surprise fees as a result of scaling and business growth. Now that’s good long-term planning.

4. TCO:
What is the projected total cost of ownership of various options?

Speaking of predictable fees, does your company project its total cost of ownership (TCO) over time for its enterprise commerce system? Many times, businesses will simply compare a one-time investment in a platform vs. annual subscription to calculate the ROI and neglect to factor in other important considerations, such as consulting fees, development costs and other costs just to get a platform running. After implementation, there are recurring costs, of course, such as licensing, hosting, staffing and more. How might all of these fees cycle as your business considers the future and trajectory of its enterprise commerce system and factoring the rate at which technology and commerce changes today?

5. API:
How might you leverage API for optimal flexibility and customization?

The application programming interface (better known as API) is a set of routines, protocols and tools for building software applications and specifies how software components should interact. How accessible a provider makes its API to others — does it define the kinds of calls that can be made, how to make them the data formats that should be used, for example — dictates how easily and efficiently a developer can write compatible code and customize front ends that interact with these platforms. Are you required to use specific templates or tools as the only ones compatible with your platform because of limited exposure to the platform’s API? This could lock your company into long-term, costly agreements and limit the flexibility of front-end user customization. In contrast, fully exposed API, such as the case with viax, provides clients unmetered usage on API, giving your developers the ability to create intuitive and consistent user experiences.

We hope you’ll find these acronyms useful as conversation triggers throughout your company. As always, I, or anyone on our viax team is here to assist you in answering your questions about how to review enterprise commerce options or host a demo with your IT team.

In our next blog, our CEO, Larry Ramponi, will discuss why viax has a hard time answering the age-old question, “Who are your biggest competitors?”