Back office software giant SAP has long coveted a leadership position in the front office, especially as digital transformation has become the initiative du jour at enterprises around the globe.
The vendor attempted to get front office traction with its Web Channel Experience Management system with limited success, which led to the 2013 acquisition of hybris. Now as part of SAP, hybris offers customer data management, context driven marketing tools and unified commerce processes.
Their commerce platform supports omnichannel digital efforts by integrating all digital and physical customer touchpoints onto a single platform, including online, mobile, point-of-sale, call center, social media and print.
The SAP hybris Commerce Suite and the allied SAP Cloud for Customer solutions enable the marketing, services, and sales functions of both B2B and B2C companies to provide their customers with a better overall experience.
To this front office suite hybris is now adding the SAP hybris Marketing solution, a central component of hybris’s strategy for its customer engagement and commerce (CEC) portfolio of products and services.
This new offering uses real-time contextual data to continuously update a 360-degree profile of both identified and prospective customers. This dynamic profile spans what each customer has done in the past, what they might do in the future, and what they are most interested in at any moment in time.
YaaS: Transforming the Behemoth
The hybris Marketing solution wasn’t the most interesting announcement at this week’s hybris customer event in Munich, however. That honor belongs to hybris as a Service, which they are referring to as YaaS or perhaps [y]aaS, [y] (with a backwards “y”) being the hybris logotype.
YaaS is a front-office business platform delivered via CloudFoundry Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) technology. It offers customers and partners the ability to build and customize ecommerce and other customer-facing capabilities in a developer-agnostic, open PaaS environment.
YaaS is currently in beta, with an expected second quarter 2015 release date. Upon launch YaaS will integrate with their core CEC portfolio. However, over time, “hybris will move to all PaaS,” according to Brian Walker, Chief Strategy Officer at hybris.
There’s more to the YaaS story than meets the eye, however. Not only does YaaS represent a next-generation strategy for hybris, it portends a momentous transformation of the SAP mother ship as well.
Read the rest of the article at http://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonbloomberg/2015/02/12/hybris-bringing-digital-transformation-to-sap/.
Intellyx advises companies on their digital transformation initiatives and helps vendors communicate their agility stories. As of the time of writing, none of the organizations mentioned in this article are Intellyx customers. hybris covered Jason Bloomberg’s travel expenses to the recent hybris customer event in Munich, a standard industry practice. Image credit: Andrew Becraft.
