hybris Partner Summit 2015

We have a special team within the NTT DATA Business Solutions family: the “hybris tiger team”, which was formed to combine our expertise and advance the innovations with SAP hybris. Last week was the SAP hybris partner summit in Munich where a couple teammates took a close look at new innovations. Achim Beckmann, member of our global hybris tiger team, kept a log file about the event:

First Day

4:00 am Oh NO =0(, that is so early! Out of Bed and on the way to the airport.

5:55 am Boarding the plane towards Munich at the cologne airport.

6:52 am There is a fantastic sunrise above the clouds, making amends for the lack of sleep. I see sunny times coming up for ecommerce business.

7:35 am Meeting up with Mark Albrecht, Klaus Wiethoff and Jörg Oberdieck at Munich Airport. The hybris Summit takes place at the Zenith center in Munich. Let´s go!

9:36 am It is about to begin. We are excited!

Hybris Announcements

9:54 am Jügen Albertsen, hybris Enterprise Architect, enters the stage to talk about the technology strategy.

DataHub and SAP integration

10:19 am Updates on the DataHub and SAP standard integration.
Between 30% and 40% of the budget of an average hybris project used to be spent on the integration into an existing SAP landscape. With the hybris DataHub exchanging data will be much faster and easier. DataHub is the central data management platform and it is the cornerstone for SAP integration with hybris. A major enhancement is also the Monitoring UI that is integrated in the hybris backend.

Variant configuration in hybris

10:58 am Carsten Hartmann, Product Manager CPQ at SAP / hybris, enters the stage.
hybris and SAP move closer together! The SAP data and customizing does not have to be re-implemented into hybris. That is a big step forward!

11:19 am Variant configuration in hybris is based on SAP Configure, Price and Quote Solution. However, the collaboration with SAP variant configuration requires that the models must be IPC compliant. More news on this in a later Blogpost.

11:25 am hybris marketing Segmentation can be used to achieve an efficient personalization. The access to the marketing Segmentation works via System Landscape Transformation (SLT) to the SAP Customer Engagement Intelligence (CEI) system.

Next track after business lunch and interesting discussions on hybris

01:05 pm How to get control of quality in your project?
The key statement was that quality is very often underestimated and forgotten in the planning phase. Success criteria as well as go live criteria have to be defined early in the project. And don’t forget to plan budget for this!

01:34 pm hybris is pretty much focusing on mobile solutions in the near future. There is already a B2B app available. The mobile solutions are developed based on hybris Omni Commerce Connect (OCC) and hybris mobile SDK. The new OCC v2.0 is now standard. There are several advantages in the new version:
– e.g. doesn’t only return JSON format, you can request results in XML as well
– improved security
– improved caching for better performance and bandwidth saving

01:53 pm The mobile “guys” from hybris enter the stage. The mobile commerce SDK now is ready for offline capabilities, which leaves the option for offline Apps.

02:15 pm It is time for the responsive Storefront & WCMS. With responsive design there is no need to implement two versions of the same site. Responsive sites adjust automatically to the screen size of the device. This is an important step forward
– There are cool new features available with a responsive storefront in the B2C accelerator (e.g. change products in PCM from within WCMS)

The second Day
8:00 am Taking a cab to the Zenith center. Excited about what will be happening today. There are a couple of people I am planning on meeting up. The hybris summit is a great place for networking and meeting the experts on the field.

8:45 am First things first. I am meeting with the Delivery Service Manager Lukas Flormann from hybris.

Customer Engagement and Commerce (CEC) Product Strategy

10:02 am hybris and the CEC Product Strategy
The biggest problem in marketing is that information is available, but distributed over a large number of systems. The result of the missing system integration is a big loss of information and a necessary investment in coordination efforts. Over 700 developers including the guys from the new acquisition “SeeWhy” were working over the last 9 months to build the new marketing platform that offers hybris Customer Engagement Intelligence (CEI). It is now available on premise and also in the Cloud. Samsung, Nespresso, T-Mobile were listed as early Key Customers.

10:40 am Now it is time for a coffee break.

11:46 am Rodolpho Cardenuto gives an introduction to hybris and the SAP partner programs

01:00 pm Summits like this are a great opportunity for our global team to meet in person. So it is time for the NTT DATA Business Solutions business lunch with: Mark Albrecht (DE), Klaus Wiethoff (DE), Jörg Oberdieck (DE), Jürgen Maier (DE), Filiz Durgut (TR), Lotte Halmö (DK), Michael Vraa-Jensen (DK), James Smith (UK), Joan Ferran (ES) and me.

04:10 pm Having had countless interesting conversations and face to face meetings with people I often only meet online, it is time for coffee and cake.

08.00 pm NTT DATA Business Solutions is one of three nominees for the newcomer of the year award. That is a great appreciation for the work we have done. There were more than 100 new hybris partners in 2014. IBM won the battle. Congratulations!

Conclusion of day two:
The hybris Partner Summit is a fantastic chance to get to know the latest features and to see what’s coming up in the next release. But much more important is the networking. We had tons of really good discussions and made up new relationships we didn’t have before.

– by Achim Beckmann