Over the last couple of weeks, I have received a heavy dose of all the wonderful benefits of cloud implementations. Cloud for POS, cloud for enterprise software, cloud for eCommerce, loyalty, analytics and optimization. Probably the most common question we get from technology vendors is “What is the business case we need to present to retailers in order to convince them to implement in the cloud? “

Our answer: there isn’t one.

Why not? Let me explain.

So far, every retailer I’ve met who has successfully implemented enterprise software in the cloud (and by this I mean, a multi-tenant solution that is supported entirely by the software vendor) has been one that decided up front as a corporate strategy to be entirely cloud-based. In other words, it was not a business case that convinced them to move entirely to the cloud. The executive leadership – business and IT together – decided they wanted their IT in the cloud, and then went about finding the best business case among their cloud-oriented choices.

Now, many of the reasons that these retailers will give you as to why they made that choice sound a lot like a business case: they wanted their IT team to spend more time on innovation and less on maintenance. They wanted to stay up to date with their software without having the huge headaches of complex updates due to accommodating customizations and hard-coded integrations. They wanted speed to value and a lower total cost of ownership, not to mention paying only for what they use while maintaining flexibility to grow rapidly if need be. They wanted to focus on business processes, and not so much on the technology that enabled those processes.

But what that means is that these companies are admitting that they don’t want highly customized packages. They want plain vanilla software (granted, highly capable vanilla software with a lot of configuration options), and as long as they can find an 80-90% match to what their business needs, the remaining 10-20% can’t possibly be so strategic that it’s worth losing the benefits of multi-tenant support from customizations.

There are a lot of retailers out there that aren’t ready to make that kind of commitment to a plain vanilla implementation. And that is probably the biggest barrier to cloud adoption out there today. If the retailer’s executive team – from CEO to all the business leads through to the IT leader – is not committed to the discipline it takes to gain all of the benefits of cloud, then no amount of money in a business case is going to change their mind.

In fact, pushing cloud without that leadership commitment can lead to disaster, and there are plenty of stories out there about retailers who have abandoned cloud implementations. I’ve heard complaints that cloud implementations don’t scale, but what I wonder is, how much of the issue was driven by the vendor’s software, and how much of that was driven by a retailer who didn’t realize what they needed to give up in customization in order to get cloud success.

So, no, there is no business case that can be made that will magically convince a skeptical retailer to take a traditional implementation and put it in the cloud. And business case is not the right level of discussion anyway. The discussion should instead be focused on the commitment to standard package implementations, modern architectures that don’t lock retailers out of future value, and discipline around accommodating how the business wants to function – which should be a tradeoff between the value of a “unique ” business process against what the business gives up in flexibility by customizing to support that unique process.

I find these discussions still rarely happen in businesses today. And until they do, cloud will remain the realm of specific applications, or the realm of committed retailers who are trying to change the way they run IT. The cloud is not about a business case. It’s about technology discipline.