Hats off to Magento and hybris

The Gartner Group’s Magic Quadrant for Digital Commerce hit the streets this week and we’re excited to see that two of the products that we’ve bet our company on have made the list: Magento and SAP® hybris.  In case you’re interested, our friends at SAP® hybris are happy to give you a free copy of this report in exchange for your contact details. 

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eBay Enterprise (Magento Enterprise Edition) – Challenger

Gartner makes a few interesting observations about Magento Enterprise who was dubbed a “Challenger” amongst the company’s reviewed.  They note that midsize and large enterprises who are especially cost conscious, and don’t mind extending their application with the help of partners, are particularly well suited to Magento Enterprise.  That’s definitely been our experience.

In addition, Magento Enterprise seems to have made great strides in improving their scalability and performance via advances in catalog indexing and caching.  They seem to have also improved their taxation capabilities and checkout workflow.

Not to take away from Magento’s strengths, but when implemented to support B2B scenarios in an SAP® environment, we prefer that taxation is accomplished in SAP® in order to ensure true Omnichanel consistency of the resultant calculations.  Along the same lines, all of our clients leverage our shopping cart and check-out process flow in their SAP® integrated B2B scenarios.  They do that in order to ensure that all SAP® business rules, and inventory and pricing data, are leveraged in real time…with zero need to map and synchronize either across both platforms.  That significantly reduces our clients’ initial implementation costs and saves them a whole bunch of aggravation (and cost) down the road as they need to support their changing business requirements.  (This is the same story…in spades…for our SAP® hybris extension).

Magento has definitely come along way from their initial popularity amongst predominantly small eCommerce website owners.  The Gartner analysts report that some Magento websites are even generating greater than $100M of revenue per year.

On that note, I’m real happy to report that our very own The Cycling Sports Group can be counted amongst those >$100 million Magento websites that are integrated with SAP® in real time!

The reports likes to provide a “balanced” view of vendors so it suggests that Magento has some “room for improvement” in the areas of: interactive selling, WCM, PIM, distributed order management, and reporting and analytics capabilities.

Those deficiencies are exactly why we’re happy that SAP® hybris made the list in the Leader’s quadrant and we’ve extended our offering to support hybris as well.

Read on.

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SAP® (hybris) – Leader

Gartner believes that the hybris organization is doing a great job innovating their product.  In particular, they feel that hybris platform has particularly strong: product information and content management, and integration API’s.

That is EXACTLY why we love hybris!

While hybris’ product is particularly strong in certain areas, it looks like their having some issues managing their growth in certain parts of the world as is evidenced by less than sterling reports about product support.

This human resources stress is only made worse by some areas of their product, like Order Management capabilities (especially in the B2B use cases), requiring extensive and expensive customizations.

Weaknesses are just opportunities for innovation.

That’s where we at Corevist come in.

By extending our platform to integrate with hybris much the same way that we’ve done with Magento for the past 4 years, we get to turn those two hybris weaknesses into strengths for SAP®.  By allowing hybris to play to its strength (product information and content management) and leveraging their great integration API’s, we overcome their weaknesses by taking over their Order Management capabilities for SAP® B2B scenarios.  We thereby reduce a client’s need (they’re using less of their software) for their expensive and apparently unresponsive support capabilities.

Win-win for SAP® hybris and our mutual clients.  The only losers in this scenario are the System Integrators who are never slow to fill a void in the marketplace by providing an army of consultants to fill the gaps.

Hats off to the authors of this year’s Magic Quadrant for Digital Commerce.  You see it the way we do :-).

Sam

The Gartner report referenced in this blog post:
Gartner, Inc. “Magic Quadrant for Digital Commerce”, by Chris Fletcher, Gene Alvarez, Praveen Sengar, Penny Gillespie and David Kohler, dated 29 September, 2014.