From Hybris to SAP Commerce Cloud

Hybris Journey

In the last few years hybris (lowercase h) has evolved to a fully-branded SAP product. The evolution happened in consistent little steps, but the end result is quite significant. The purpose of this post is to get you familiar with this SAP product, its journey to where it is now, and how the future looks like.

 

Those who have been working on hybris for long will still remember the blue logo with inverted lambda symbol. hybris was acquired by SAP in 2013 and it became SAP Hybris (with uppercase H). Hybris was (and still is) a strong brand in the e-commerce field, and SAP’s former attempt at an e-commerce solution (SAP Web Channel Experience Management) was discontinued soon after the acquisition.

 

 

Over the years, SAP made the brand stronger and brought it to the global market. SAP Hybris suite was created with SAP Hybris Commerce (original Hybris software) as the e-commerce solution. A few other SAP native products were added in the suite (e.g. SAP Hybris Marketing and SAP Hybris Sales): these products ran on completely different technology stacks compared to the Hybris original software, and had little or no OOTB (out-of-the-box) integrations. Slowly the integrations were implemented, but, in the meantime, a lot of customers implemented their own customized modules to make these integrations work.

The Hybris brand attracted many customers across the globe over next five years. It has consistently been a leader in Gartner’s Magic quadrant for Digital Commerce. Hybris proved its potential and served its purpose. In 2018, SAP decided to dissolve the brand completely and renamed it to SAP Customer Experience (or CX in short). SAP Hybris became SAP CX Commerce. Versioning of the releases was changed to align it with SAP’s way. Online resources are also moved to SAP’s portal. Let’s look at these updates it in a bit more detail.

Change in the release versioning

Hybris versioning used to follow X.Y.Z.P format.
X – Major Release
Y – Minor Release
Z – Feature Release
P – Patch Release

SAP has its own way of versioning the releases which is YYMM: YY represents the year and MM represents the month of the release. This is followed across all SAP products. This style was introduced to SAP Commerce in August 2018 and hence the release version was called 1808. There is no concept or major/minor/feature releases anymore. After 1808, 1811 was released in November 2018 and 1905 is just around the corner.

Ambiguities with Industry solutions

Not all the industry solutions (or packages) are launched with the new release of SAP Commerce. For example, the Financial Services Accelerator (FSA) is usually released two to three months later. The FSA compatible with 1808 was released in October 2018, hence called FSA 1810. This is important to note because a customer using FSA cannot upgrade to a new SAP Commerce version until the corresponding FSA is available as well.

The following is the compatibility table of SAP commerce and FSA.

SAP Commerce Version	Compatible FSA Version
SAP Commerce 6.7	FSA 6.7
SAP Commerce 1808	FSA 1810
SAP Commerce 1811	FSA 1902

 

Documentation and Experts community

The Hybris Wiki was the historical entry point for anyone looking for more information on Hybris. Hybris Help was born with the launch of Hybris 6.0 and all the technical and functional documentation was moved to Help from Wiki. The new documentation website was appreciated by the community, as search and navigation were better than the Wiki. Recently, Hybris Help has been moved to SAP Help Portal. The new portal has almost the same features, but one needs to get familiar with it. Those who have used SAP portals before might find it convenient, but others might miss the cleaner look and feel and the friendly left side navigation which were available on the Hybris help.

Hybris Experts is another platform which is used to ask questions to the community members. Soon, also this community will be merged with SAP Community, and, given the more attractive rewarding system available on this platform, it might encourage people to contribute more to it.

Future

SAP’s direction is to move CX Commerce to Cloud in the next few years. The Cloud subscriptions are now the next hot topic, leaving behind the old On-Prem licenses. New features are now introduced via the Commerce Cloud Extension Packs, and although downloadable also with on-prem licenses, these packs are designed for the Cloud version.

According to the official Roadmap, the company is investing a lot on Cloud Automation, headless storefront (Spartacus) and SAP Integrations. It all looks very exciting but it is early to say much about it at this stage. More on this in my next post.