Five Things I Learned at the hybris Global Partner Summit
Growth is the word that best describes the 2105 hybris Global Customer Days and Partner Summit in Munich last week. I was there to witness this year’s event, which represented the largest gathering of worldwide hybris devotees to date, including a 12,000-developer strong partner ecosystem, as well as many representatives from the 275 new customers of the hybris platform. Overall, the platform experienced an incredible 122% growth.
Here are my top five observations from the show:
- hybris now is responsible for multiple products from the SAP portfolio, including SeeWhy for conversion optimization, CEI for customer intelligence, C4C cloud for customer integration, and BRIM for payment and billing. hybris’ goal is to deliver a consistent contextual engagement by tightly integrating this software stack in support of their customer’s eCommerce business.
- In hybris view, omnichannel is just business and it’s the table stakes for playing in the eCommerce market. Along those lines, digital transformation is an imperative, not an option. The largest companies in the world have moved from planning to implementation of omnichannel initiatives.
- Data fuels online retailer growth, and that’s why hybris is so focused on helping customers use it to improve their business. One example of how data helps marketers is to focus on the broken marketing processes. A stunning 80% of email sent doesn’t even get opened, mainly because it’s not relevant to the customer who receives it. Customers are bombarded with irrelevant offers, and the failure rate would be considered unacceptable in any other endeavor. hybris addresses this challenge by making contextual data available. hybris has hundreds of developers working on this single view of the customer, which will enable marketers to leverage real-time signals of what their customers are doing right now.
- There was much new information regarding the roadmap for DataHub, hybris approach to integrating disparate systems and the data they share. DataHub enables retailers to take charge of data integration through easy import and export of data between hybris and external data storage solutions. To date, it has been positioned as a framework for integrating hybris with other back end systems, specifically SAP R/3. One of the new developments in the roadmap, however, is to leverage DataHub for hybris to hybris integration, which enables hybris to scale horizontally into clusters that are capable of extremely high transaction throughput.
- Finally, hybris introduced two initiatives that extend advanced eCommerce capabilities in more flexible implementation models. First, hybris Cloud for Commerce offers on-demand and managed services approach to commerce, and enables certified partners to provide cloud-based services based on hybris software to clients. Second, hybris announced hybris-as-a-service (YAAS), currently in beta, which offers a cloud platform that enables merchants and partners to easily develop and sell discrete services or applications. YAAS can be extended through the cloud using microservices based on a multi-tenant model with infrastructure based upon Cloud Foundry.
2015 will no doubt bring tremendous growth and opportunity to those who use the hybris platform. I saw tremendous momentum and a lot of exciting new capabilities in the works for 2015.
Brian Wolfe is CIO of Lyons Consulting Group and is a frequent speaker at technology industry events. Brian holds a BS in Computer Science from the University of Michigan, an MS in Computer Science from DePaul University and a Certificate in Business Administration from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Brian currently serves as a member of the advisory board for DePaul University’s College of Computing and Digital Media.
