Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

Sears on Tuesday (April 24) launched a service to provide managed technology services for “brick-and-mortar enterprises across all industry verticals.” It is a move partly aimed at Amazon’s cloud service, with Sears promising much more customization and hand-holding. For many retail observers, this was a baffling step, another non-strategic distraction at a time when the 119-year-old retailer needed to do nothing more than focus on selling more products in its stores.

For Sears, though, the move made fiscal sense. With all of those dollars invested in IT systems—with more capacity than Sears needs—why not, in effect, lease some of it? Put another way: Turn IT from a pure cost-center to a mostly cost-center that generates at least some revenue. From an investor’s perspective, some revenue is better than no revenue. (On some days, that seems to be Sears’ retail strategy, too.)

Beyond the Amazon competitive issue and the effort to get any revenue out of IT, some have suggested that people perceive Sears Holdings—as opposed to just plain Sears—as a retail company, which it simply isn’t.

If you remember that Sears Holdings is a diversified financial group, this move—dubbed MetaScale—looks less perplexing. Even written comments from Sears spokesman Tom Aiello support this non-retail diversification interpretation.

“MetaScale was possible because of the effort Sears is putting into technology and the shift toward integrated retail. And you remember that Sears is known for startups, whether it was Allstate, Discover Card or Prodigy, to name a few,” Aiello said. Note that none of the three examples offered is a retailer. An insurance company and an online firm created back before E-Commerce was an issue have nothing to do with traditional retail. At least Discover is a card that could be used to make payments at Sears, so it was at least a little related, but it never appeared that Discover was intended to bolster Sears stores. It was simply a diversified investment.

That may be true, but some in retail found it more of a desperation move. Either that or an “I don’t care about retail any more” move.

“Sears and its future seem more uncertain every day. That’s what I take away from all of this,” said Nikki Baird, a long-time retail analyst and, today, the managing partner at RSR Research.

Over at RetailWire, a discussion opened up on its comments boards, with almost no one initially taking the pro-Sears position.

“Technology services? Sure, why not? How about stem-cell research or maybe an airline?” asked Bill Emerson, president of Emerson Advisors. “The only puzzle is why this financier continues to hold on to Sears. He obviously has no aptitude or interest in retail. One might surmise that he’s just using the real estate to collateralize whatever happens to interest him at any given moment.”

Added Richard Seesel, a principal with Retailing In Focus: “There is a long list of specialists in providing data services and information management especially to retailers—such as IBM, SAP, SAS and others. This looks like yet another attempt by Sears Holdings to avoid dealing with its core problem: The lack of capital spending and compelling merchandise in its stores. If the methodology behind MetaScale were so effective, wouldn’t we all be talking about Sears’ great results in supply chain and inventory management? Sears Holdings ended 2011 with 5 percent less inventory but also had a gross margin decrease from 27.2 percent to 25.5 percent, which is not exactly worthy of bragging rights.”