Simplifying the complex tangle of interconnected systems is a refrain we hear often when enterprise IT is the topic at vendor events such as this week’s IBM Smarter Commerce event.

The issue is one about the new and the old. It’s about the old mainframes and the legacy infrastructure developed over a span of 20 years clashing with innovative new technologies.

The traditional, legacy technologies established a system of record. Internal systems helped optimize the workings of the enterprise. Foe example, SAP developed ERP systems that became the standard for businesses to manage operations.

In today’s world, IBM sees a shift that is customer centric. Based upon that principle, IBM developed the smarter commerce initiative and launched it last spring. As part of that, IBM now sees a cloud-based e-commerce environment, flexible enough to integrate the many technologies in the IBM portfolio.

It is a turn that many students of the social Web recognized a number of years ago.  In the first wave came the blogs. The discussions opened a deeper vein of customer sentiment about brands and the deficiencies in the services they provided. Today, blogs still play a big role but the marketers also follow Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn and any number of other services that surface a person’s social graph.

IBM sees this as an opportunity to simplify its infrastructure for customers. As Mike Vizard points out, the offerings include Sterling Commerce, Websphere, Cognos, Netezza, Unica, Coremetrix ILOG and FileNet product lines.

That’s a lot to grasp but the objective is right. IBM seeks to create a flexible framework. A loosely coupled environment? That’s a question of what expertise the customer has in-house to launch such an initiative. To help, IBM has built a 1,000 person services group.

IBM calls this new play its commerce-as-a-service. It’s an unfortunate name but let’s move beyond that. It’s designed to connect infrastructure to customer facing services. For example, IBM is offering a cloud-based configure, price and quote offering that bundles offers automatically.

Services Angle

The offerings here also include ways to connect customers across Web storefronts, mobile devices and social networks to help drive in-store purchases.

The intent – drive high volume customers to PCI-compliant solutions that connect infrastructure to front-end customer facing technologies that can be used to optimize digital marketing efforts.

As I noted in an earlier post, this means big internal changes for companies. But companies need this kind of change to IT. As Vizard points out:

Smarter Commerce projects of this type and scale obviously require commitment from the senior business leadership of the company. But it’s becoming clear that business leaders are not only demanding a more flexible IT environment, they are also starting to appreciate how to use IT to fundamentally change business outcomes for the better.