“E-commerce” is a dated concept, consistent with Hybris CEO Ariel Luedi. Instead we must always contemplate all kinds of purchaser transactions simply as commerce. We must always also stop handling digital transactions and standard transactions with separate silos of technology.
Luedi touts Hybris as a contemporary platform that handles the complexities of managing multiple customer touch points, delivering consistent information and consistent customer experience without reference to how the buyer desires to do business. Start a transaction online and you may pick up a phone and complete it through a decision center while not having to begin from scratch. That promotional price quoted in an email offer won’t be new news to the shop clerk or call center service rep. And if you purchase something online you possibly can return it at store with no problem.
It’s easier for Luedi to be bold about his promises now that Hybris is officially portion of SAP — a deal formally closed last week and extensively discussed on Tuesday at SAP’s offices in Ny city. The terms of the deal weren’t disclosed, however the Wall Street Journal quoted unnamed sources who put the deal at greater than $1 billion. It was an individual company with roughly 700 employees and $150 million annual revenue run rate. But now that Hybris has SAP’s backing, Luedi says one in every of his biggest challenges may be “not drowning popular.”
[ Want more info at the marketing arms race among tech vendors? Read Salesforce.com’s ExactTarget Buy Equals Marketing Clout. ]
Hybris’ strong suit is supporting business-to-business (B2B) commerce, nevertheless it also supports business-to-consumer (B2C) commerce, product content management and order management. B2B customers include the likes of commercial products supplier Granger while coffee equipment maker Nespresso and camera manufacturer Nikon use Hybris for both B2B and B2C commerce.
Hybris’ core architecture provides a master data-management layer said to guarantee consistent inventory, pricing, order-status and other information across channels, whether that’s Web, mobile, call center or retail stores. There’s also a process-management layer that applies an identical business rules across channels, so prices and promotions encountered online are in step with those encountered in stores or on mobile devices.
SAP was trying to grow organically within the commerce arena with its Web Channel Experience Management system, but SAP “finally reached the realization that catching up via a build strategy was not working,” writes Forrester Research analyst Peter Sheldon. With the Hybris acquisition completed, Sheldon says the enterprise commerce technology landscape is now “dominated by four large software companies: SAP, IBM, Oracle and eBay.”
IBM and Oracle are clearly SAP’s chief rivals, and they’ve both spent billions on acquisitions within the commerce and customer experience arena. The foremost directly competitive products to Hybris at IBM are Unica and Sterling Commerce, while Oracle has ATG and commerce-oriented bits and pieces of BEA, E-Business Suite, FatWire, Stellent and Eloqua.
Hybris, with the intention to continue as an independent business run by Luedi, has basic Website management (WCM) capabilities, nonetheless it has long partnered with Adobe’s for its deeper Experience Management WCM capabilities. The more important piece missing from SAP’s portfolio is marketing automation, a hole plugged by IBM with its $480 million, 2010 Unica buy, by Oracle with its $871 million Eloqua acquisition in January and by Salesforce.com (which lacks a commerce platform) with its $2.5 billion ExactTarget deal in June.
Luedi dismissed these competitors on Tuesday, describing Unica as lacking on campaign execution, Eloqua as heavily interested in lead management and ExactTarget as limited to email campaign execution. SAP executives said they’re going to build, partner or buy to fill in lacking components and supply a more complete and automatic experience.
“In our vision, if somebody defines a campaign for this product in these markets for this price and these customer segments for this duration etc, when these definitions are entered, the campaigns will actually happen,” Luedi says. “Straight away there’s a synthetic break between the planning phase and the execution.”
That’s a powerful vision statement, but it’s just vision. IBM and Oracle have head starts and bigger scale in commerce. Sterling Commerce had revenues of $700 million when it was acquired by IBM in 2010 and ATG was on the right track for $200 million when it was acquired by Oracle that very same year. IBM and Oracle have also filled inside the marketing automation piece, so it will likely be no shocker if SAP makes another acquisition — all of the better if that move also bolsters the company’s cloud-computing revenue.
SAP’s commerce story is obviously getting a huge boost boost with Hybris, and it’s being smart about letting Luedi run it as an independent company, with continued support for third-party ERP systems and partnerships with the likes of Adobe. Luedi insists that Hybris’ technology is 2 generations younger than the competitors and fascinated by consistent experience as opposed to the old fashioned of “managing” customers.
“Most companies do not realize that they’ve lost control of the client relationship,” Luedi says. “Those days are over, so that you need to let go and be prepared and adapt to the moods and channel selections of the shoppers.”
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