While theCube has been at SAP SAPphire 2012 this week, its competition at NetSuite used its own SuiteWorld event here in San Francisco to launch a new commerce-as-a-service (CaaS) product built on the brand new SuiteCommerce platform. NetSuite is traditionally known as an ERP company, but the hope is that connecting back-end data will set it apart in the eCommerce market.

NetSuite SuiteCommerce is aimed at providing one central system that manages customer transactions and customer interactions across “touchpoints” like mobile devices, a traditional browser, or even in a brick-and-mortar store. It’s also designed to handle business-to-business (B2B) and machine-to-machine (M2M) transactions.

“By transforming the NetSuite business application into a commerce-aware platform, we enable our customers to extend the richest set of cloud operational capabilities available anywhere directly to their customers, regardless of the device those customers are using—be it a smart phone, a tablet, a personal computer, a point-of-sale system, or touchpoints not yet developed,” said NetSuite CEO Zach Nelson in a statement.

SuiteCommerce comes in two varieties: A mid-market version exposes the basic set of NetSuite data to the commerce experience, while a version aimed at larger enterprises brings much deeper integration, cross-functionality, and business logic implementation between the ERP and commerce platforms. All in all, NetSuite is promoting its integrated cloud platform as a framework to create new customer experiences, bringing back-end data to the forefront with native processing capabilities.

On the broader scale, NetSuite SuiteCommerce and the new Commerce-as-a-Service (CaaS) platform are a weapon at getting rid of so-called “first generation” eCommerce system providers like Magento and Demandwire – not to mention on-premise rivals like IBM, SAP, Sage and Microsoft, which collectively account for a huge percentage of the retail software market.