enVista, a supply chain consulting and IT services firm, said today it created a software business to support small to midsized retailers in their efforts to penetrate omnichannel commerce.

Dubbed "Enspire Commerce," the independent company will offer smaller e-tailers one platform for omnichannel selling, optimization, fulfillment, and integration, Indianapolis-based enVista said. enVista CEO Jim Barnes, who will head the unit, said this is the only end-to-end solution for smaller companies seeking such a broad range of services.

"What we see in the market space of direct-to-consumer, B-to-C, and brick-and-mortar business is that there are significant gaps in technology when it comes to helping companies handle omnichannel business challenges," Barnes said in an interview. Enspire Commerce intends to bridge these gaps for small to midmarket retailers, distributors, and third-party logistics providers (3PLs) by offering software tools through a cloud-based, software as a service (SaaS) solution that can scale up as the companies grow.

Subscribers can adopt any applications they need from a menu that includes retail engagement/point of sale (POS), advanced order management, product information management (PIM), trading partner management (TPM), and e-commerce solutions.

According to Barnes, this model is far more efficient than the typical strategy, which requires small e-commerce companies to cobble together solutions from a collection of disparate software providers that sometimes have trouble integrating data from different sources.

Performance Bicycle, a Chapel Hill, N.C.-based company, had been using an electronic data exchange (EDI) platform from one software provider and an order management system from another. Since adopting Enspire Commerce, Performance Bicycle has combined several order and shipping services under a single ECM umbrella and trimmed its budget for software spending, Barnes said.