There are some conferences where I get to spend the whole time in sessions (and I happily tweet everything I hear that I like), and then there are conferences where the only session I get to hear is my own. Internet Retailer (IRCE — #IRCE2011 for those of you playing along on Twitter) is definitely one of the latter. There were a couple of exceptions — I got to see the first half of the Walgreens keynote on cross-channel, and a session on the mobile consumer.

When I don’t get to go to a lot of sessions, it’s because I’m meeting with vendors out on the exhibit hall floor. If you’re looking for an indication for the health of IRCE, then I’ll just note that roughly half the vendors I met with said they were first-time exhibitors, and many were very happy with the foot traffic they saw out on the floor. But usually, meeting with vendors and catching only a few sessions means I get a very disjointed view of what to take away from a conference. Not so with IRCE.

The sessions and the vendor meetings might have seemed random on the surface — Walgreens vs. some pretty dry mobile consumer stats? A digital marketing optimization company vs. site personalization? How about an eCommerce platform/ERP vs. social/event-based commerce? But there is a strong theme that underlies it all, and ironically, it’s an old one — how web technologies can transform the delivery of enterprise processes.

A big, strange leap, isn’t it? I feel that way myself — a little bit of Back to the Future, a little bit of Minority Report. Back to the future because didn’t we have a lot of these discussions during the First Great Rise of the Internet? How, once everything is web-enabled, then the sky would be the limit in terms of defining a process and pulling together the bits and pieces of technology to enable it? It’s a story that sounds a lot like object-oriented programming, a lot like service-oriented architecture, and a lot like web services. It’s a story I heard at IRCE from Agilone, a company that provides digital marketing touchpoint optimization (a mouthful, I know, but slightly more descriptive than their own revenue attribution) — basically, a way to figure out how to Basically, they leverage the information that companies like Google provide to optimize the full run of path-to-purchase touchpoints so that you’re not focusing on the last touchpoint as the one that drives revenue, but the combination of multiple touchpoints over time. It’s a story told by NetSuite, an ERP vendor that is busy re-envisioning itself as an eCommerce vendor — with a twist. But in order to get to that twist, you have to bear with me for minute.

On the way-futuristic, Minority Report side, there are companies like 8^th Bridge, Kenshoo, Baynote, and Agilone. On the surface, not a lot in common. 8^th Bridge has created some social commerce capabilities that leverage events and their social nature for commerce purposes. Kenshoo provides massive automation and scale to search advertising, and Baynote provides sites personalization.

What do all of these capabilities have in common? They take enterprise functions — marketing and commerce — and they expose very basic pieces of those functions to consumers. With 8^th Bridge, it’s not about controlling the customer’s event, it’s about letting a customer build their own event in their own way — like on Facebook — and then providing them the commerce tools to make the event happen, for example, by getting a group together to go see a concert. With Kenshoo, it’s about understanding how customers search for products, and providing transparency into enterprise information — like inventory availability by location — to deliver highly relevant search-based ads, and doing it in a way that doesn’t take an army of people to execute. With Baynote, intelligent searchandising uses shopper behavior online to customize their browsing experience — in effect, letting consumers define the retailer’s product hierarchy.

Now let’s throw in Walgreens and the mobile consumer. Walgreens developed a mobile app that lets consumers scan a barcode on their prescriptions with their phone to order a refill. You can see how it works in their ad here. It has been received to rave reviews, winning awards, but most importantly gaining huge adoption among Walgreens shoppers. The beauty is its simplicity — it takes a corporate function and gives consumers far more control over the process. Now, this is a process that has been slowly placed into consumers’ hands over time — from the days when you had to go into a store to order a refill, to the days when you had to call in, to an automated call-in system. So from that perspective a mobile app for refills is not revolutionary. But what Walgreens did was focus on how to make something easier for customers. It wasn’t going to really net them any new prescriptions, but it did net them a lot of consumer props — and loyalty — as a result.

So back to NetSuite’s twist. They want to rethink ERP as a load of web services that can be exposed via an eCommerce platform. Not for employees — not for the business — this is something that a lot of ERP companies have been talking about for a long time. They want to expose business processes to consumers. Shoppers. An interesting side-effect of this tactic is that there are a host of companies waiting in the wings — like Kenshoo or Agilone — who are poised to take advantage of those services to build additional customer- or corporate-facing business processes on top of them.

Back to the future, indeed.