Digital Commerce

Hybris Vs WebSphere Commerce

Recently I had the opportunity to do a deep dive analysis and evaluation of 2, of the top 3 eCommerce packages on the market.  IBM Web Sphere Commerce & Hybris Multichannel eCommerce.  The other comparable product is ATG and since it’s recent acquisition by Oracle was not a consideration.

Both packages that I evaluated have their relative strengths and weaknesses. Neither one is completely superior to the other, choice comes down to the unique needs of your business.

WebSphere Commerce:

Pros:

1. Powerful “out of the box” capability. If your business is more of a traditional eCommerce vertical you may not need much customization.

2. Acquisition of Sterling Commerce provides a best in class OMS. While not a part of the WebSphere Commerce product, the integration is pre-packaged.

3. “Nobody ever got fired by using IBM”.

4. Documentation is easy to use and access from anywhere.

5.  Their “Smarter Commerce” strategy makes a lot of sense from a business perspective.

6.  Integration with Coremetrics is tight and opens up a lot of opportunity to improve digital marketing.

Cons:

1. Content Management (WCMS) is quite weak and will most likely require a 3rd party product to fit the needs of your content developers.

2. WebSphere Commerce OMS capability is weak, will likely require the additional Sterling Commerce OMS product at additional cost and integration complexity.

3. IBM’s strategy has long been to buy technology companies and “Integrate” them with WebSphere Commerce. This strategy is great for marketing and quickly adding capabilities but is a huge problem for their customers. Maintaining the integration between all of these products is a lot of overhead. A survey of WebSphere Commerce users indicates an overwhelming percentage of them are on versions at least 2 major releases back. Upgrading the product is a significant undertaking.

3. The product architecture EJB requires a fairly highly qualified and expensive engineering team to customize and maintain.

Hybris:

Pros:

1. Highly flexible platform built on the Spring architecture.

2. The Product Content Management (PCM) capability is best in class.  Managing structured or unstructured data in relation to a product catalog is very powerful.

3.  WCMS is good out of the box, the UI is a little clunky but once you get used to it the capability is powerful.

4.  The Hybris production was built with internationalization in mind, adding multi-currency and multi-language is straightforward.

5.  Great consulting firm partnerships for implementation and integration.

6.  Recent acquisition of iCongo greatly improves their OMS capability.

Cons:

1.  The administrative UI is clunky, Hybris is aware of it and has greatly improved it but there is room to improve here.

2.  Product documentation is lacking, most of their information is exposed through a Wiki and quite technical in nature.

Measuring a brands social performance

The other day I had coffee with some developers from the Dachis Group and discussed a new SaaS product they are offering. Based on an index called the Social Business Index or SBI that provides deep analytics on a company’s social performance.

The product is called SPM or Social Performance Monitor that is a “subscription based Saas application that tracks your brand’s social activities against crucial brand marketing business outcomes like: brand awareness, brand love, brand mindshare and brand advocacy.

Unlike alternatives that focus on simplistic stats in a vacuum, Social Performance Monitor gives you specific metrics correlated to your brand marketing business outcomes and benchmarked against your competitors relative performance, industry peers, and worldwide best in class.”

The beauty behind this system is the ability to pull all social engagements from your company into one aggregated view. This has huge potential for firms that do not have a central “Social Media Management” group.

Given the disparate groups operating social media accounts it is incredibly difficult for an organization to understand and measure their social performance or message. As the old saying goes “You cannot manage what you cannot measure”. Often times the message is inconsistent and there is no good way to aggregate a firms social performance. The SPM system holds a lot of promise and is something certainly worth evaluating for your business.

Codecademy is a great way to get & stay sharp

When I first heard of Codeacadmey I did not think that it was anything worth exploring especially since it was in an article from a political figure claiming he was learning to code with it.

To my surprise the tutorials are not only relevant but somewhat challenging and a great way for someone that knows a little about front end development to get to the next level of skill.  It is also a great way for a senior level developer to keep their foundation skills sharp in a fun way.

Since I signed up for an account I have gone through the HTML and CSS tutorials and I must say they taught me some things that I did not already know.  The Javascript tutorials are also excellent and getting better by the day. 

The teaching theory of doing versus reading or listening comes into play here, the tutorials give you a place to practice in a live environment.