When talking to retailers, reporters, and even industry analysts in the eCommerce space, we sometimes run into an issue where the person we’re speaking with is absolutely convinced that every company should—and does—want a hosted model of software. Far be it from us to knock SaaS—we offer our eCommerce solutions in both license/on-premise and on-demand deployments. But still, there are skeptics who just don’t “get it” that a one-size-fits-all approach is faulty.

Last month, Gartner released findings suggesting that in certain implementations, the Software as a Service model is not as cost-effective — or even effective — as earlier projections and experiences have led some companies to believe. Sure, it can be cheaper and offer an impressive speed to launch. For some retailers, this makes perfect sense and helps them get the best out of technology without having to put their hands in it. Yet, they say for complex, larger implementations this just isn’t your best bet.

It’s interesting, but there doesn’t even seem to be a consensus on the definition of SaaS. Forrester has a very rigid definition, calling out SaaS as “built from the ground up to be multi-tenant at all layers of the stack: database, server, and application.” Yet the more common view found in wikipedia is in line with our view that SaaS is “a model of software delivery where the software company provides maintenance, daily technical operation and support for the software provided to their client.” The key here is that there must be flexibility—the strictly multi-tenant approach does not work 100% of the time.

Serious merchants do not want to suffer the work or risk of downtime on someone else’s schedule — and the risk of upgrade problems is real. How does multi-tenant work in a situation where a single store needs more than one server—which is most serious merchants.  It doesn’t—even the multi-tenant players must use dedicated tenancy in this case.

We are multi-tenant in the parts of the stack where it makes sense, such as in data storage, and dedicated where that makes sense. The oldest rule is at play here—“treat customers how you want to be treated.” That means we should be treating each implementation uniquely, and offering what makes sense. Otherwise, you’re simply doing a disservice on the hope that you make a sale.