Fujitsu and Hallmark have inked a long-term deal that will see the multinational IT firm manage the greeting card company’s retail software through a retail-as-a-service (RaaS) arrangement. Fujitsu will manage Hallmark’s Retail.net private cloud for ten years and host the software on its own servers. The deal highlights some of the benefits that retail-as-a-service provides for businesses.

This might be the first time you have seen the term RaaS, but the concept is not new. Like SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) and PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service), the essential premise of RaaS is that the customer pays for service, usually on a subscription basis, and the provider delivers managed cloud-based software that is supported and updated regularly.

Like any cloud solution, the technical benefits include lower capital expenditures for hardware and on-premise software and lower requirements for infrastructure and personnel. But for retail companies in particular, the benefits answer a much larger problem that has loomed over the industry for far too long. Most of the ERP (enterprise resource planning) and PoS (point of sale) solutions on the market are bloated, complex, and ridiculously expensive to implement. RaaS may be just the solution businesses, especially small to medium ones, need.

Fujitsu is not the first company to offer retail-as-a-service on a large scale. Last year, eBay acquired Magento, makers of the exceedingly popular eCommerce software by the same name, and created a retail-as-a-service solution called Magento Go. Other business application vendors, such as Epicor, have taken notice and developed their own “retail SaaS” offerings.

If the deals from the above companies work out anything like the Fujitsu-Hallmark deal, many more may sign up for RaaS. Details of the deal include deployment, support, maintenance, full point of sale (PoS) integration, real-time inventory management, and web portal ordering service. It should allow Hallmark to focus less on technology and more on birthdays, graduations, and holidays.