Hybris: Customer focus redefined

The e-commerce specialist Hybris was acquired by SAP in 2013. The core product was an online store, but it was already in productive use at large companies.

SAP has thus acquired a very good customer base in an area where the company has always had problems bringing competitive products to market.

In addition, Hybris was successful in addressing customers via the marketing and sales department, while SAP itself mainly accessed customers via the IT side. Thus, Hybris opens a new access for SAP to sell sales solutions.

Hybris Commerce:

Since a sales solution will have to respond very flexibly to customer needs in the future, the expectations here are not the same as for the support processes of finance, logistics or HR, for example, on which SAP has focused to date.

In the sales sector, solutions are not purchased ready-made, but are continuously adapted individually to the respective customer. This is exactly what Hybris Commerce (online store and product catalog) is best prepared for with its open Java Spring Framework.

Hybris Commerce is continuously extended by accelerators, which map special scenarios in online sales, such as the sale of telecom bundles or online insurance. This is comparable to the industry solutions of R/3, since the customer must decide on an accelerator and activate it once.

Hybris Marketing & Hybris Billing:

For real-time customer data analysis or large-scale billing, other products from SAP have been added to the Hybris family.

Hybris Marketing is a Hana-based solution for creating customer profiles and analyzing them in real time. Hybris Billing is also based on Hana and focuses on processing large volumes of billing documents.

Both products have nothing to do with the original Hybris Commerce, but are needed in the context of modern sales scenarios.

It therefore makes sense for SAP to integrate these products technically (which has been rather mediocre so far) and to market them under the joint Hybris brand to the target group of sales and marketing managers, who had previously tended to avoid contact with SAP solutions.

YaaS:

The existing three Hybris solutions will soon be supplemented by Hybris as a Service (YaaS). This is a service platform on which extensions such as integration services in Pinterest to the standard functions can be developed and made available.

The services run independently of SAP on platforms that support Java (including Amazon), but of course also on the Hana Cloud Platform (HCP).

All products offered under Hybris together thus form the new customer interface of the SAP platform. It is not something prefabricated, as that is not what sales managers want, but a comprehensive toolset that can be used to build modern, high-performance, customer-oriented, individual solutions.

These are capable of making customer centricity in sales a reality through appropriate performance, even with larger volumes of data. Hybris is more than the old SAP WCEM (Web Channel Experience Management) ever was, which consequently also led to its immediate discontinuation in 2013.

With the Hybris product portfolio, SAP is taking a new path with open standards and a cloud-based ecosystem geared to development partners. The times when one manufacturer alone could cover all customer needs with a standard solution are over with the digital transformation.

What is required today is a stable core (S/4) that is capable of managing processes that can serve ever-growing customer needs quickly and flexibly - on any device and platform.

The Hybris product family creates this opportunity and thus becomes a critical success factor for SAP and its customers.