As CEO of Ecommerce Accelerator (ECA), I have been slowly digesting the news that our main partner, hybris, has been acquired by SAP. On the face of it, this sounds promising. There have been rumors of this merger flying around since the day we joined as a hybris partner.
Two German companies with lots of similarities, in style and approach. On the other hand, even just a few months ago at the hybris Global Partner Days in Munich, all of the talk was still of an IPO so I think this must have happened fairly quickly. Certainly at ECA, we were taken completely by surprise with the announcement, even though we were at Sapphire with hybris demonstrating our new hybris SAP connector.
SAP by Design and hybris
Early in our partnership, we worked with hybris to help them develop the integration between SAP by Design and hybris. ECA provides this solution to the North American marketplace. Two Sapphire’s ago (the global SAP conference), there was a lot of buzz from SAP that SAP by Design was an important part of their future because it allowed SAP to enter the lower mid-market. Given what we have seen, there hasn’t been as much traction as SAP would have liked in this area but we are still hopeful.
Recently, ECA developed a standard integration between hybris and SAP ECC 6.0 that provides a standards based and extensible framework for any SI or hybris client to use to speed the integration between SAP and hybris. We made the decision to provide this free of charge in the hybris Extend network because we saw time and time again in our own projects (and in other projects) that clients were spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on simply integrating the two systems with no benefit to their businesses. To learn more about this integration, download the one-sheet from our website. Or read our blog post about it.
Business innovation without technology limitations
This has been ECA’s vision since we started. What we see is that in the multi-channel commerce space, customers are spending so many resources on getting these plumbing details taken care of that they have no time or resources to actually do any business innovation for many months after they select hybris. Particularly for SAP clients, having access now to a great commerce platform on top of their SAP instance will provide enormous benefits and allow them to unlock the hidden value of their entire supply chain.
In our eyes, the faster and more efficiently we can get them integrated, the sooner we can help them figure out how to unlock this value and start to leverage both their ERP and hybris omni-channel commerce solution into the holy grail of both B to C and B to B commerce. This provides one customer view across every channel.
ECA’s Perspective on the SAP Acquisition
From ECA’s perspective, we have now spent two years building our expertise and investing in hybris and SAP. We have also invested quite heavily in understanding how to make the connections between SAP and hybris come together to allow for true, omni-channel commerce. I believe we are now uniquely positioned to take advantage of this merger between SAP and hybris and look forward to getting things rolling in fourth quarter and beyond.
The only thing that scares us is that SAP, just by its sheer size, will slow down the innovation we have become accustomed to from our friends at hybris. From what we know now, the idea is to keep hybris independent, much as SAP has done with their last two significant acquisitions.
If that is really the outcome then the combination of hybris innovation and SAP scale will be unbeatable.
