We had the opportunity to understand SAP Hybris’ user conference, Hybris Live, held in Barcelona from October 17th till 19th2017. The conference was well attended, with over 3000 attendees. It also marked SAP Hybris’ first user conference outside of Germany and the 20thanniversary of the Hybris. The conference had a great show floor design, similar to Sapphire, mixing education, SAP and partner booths, refreshments and demo stations in a great setup.
Of course there is an event video - take a look:
Here is the 1 slide condensation (if the slide doesn’t show up, check here):
Here is the 1 slide condensation (if the slide doesn’t show up, check here):
Want to read on? Here you go:
The SAP Network Economy Message comes together – In spring SAP re-organized its network economy assets (SAP Ariba, SAP Concur, SAP Hybris and SAP SuccessFactors) under Rob Enslin (see news analysis here). The messaging how these entities and products fit together, relate to overall SAP strategy, take up new technologies, relate to S4/HANA etc. is getting clearer (and better) since summer. This is a key area of interest for suite level SAP customers and prospects.
 |
| Thoma opens SAP Hybris Live |
Multicloud for SAP Hybris – SAP Hybris’ YaaS strategy is moving towards a general micro services strategy, that can be deployed on the usual IaaS choices, with Kubernetes doing a lot of the heavy lifting. But it also gives SAP Hybris the option to deploy on premises, reaching more customers. The move to microservices and higher consumability is giving customers and prospects flexibility that is key for ecommerce and next gen application deployments.
Hybris Profile gets Gigya – SAP recently announced the acquisition of Gigya (see press release here), adding capabilities in access and identity management. Though the acquisition hasn’t closed, and executives were not allowed to make forward looking statement, it is clear Gigya will strengthen the SAP Hybris Profile. But it is only a start, more information needs to be collected, including (of course GDPR compliant) 3rdparty information.
 |
| Thoma and his One Channel Vision |
Hybris Profile gets Gigya – SAP recently announced the acquisition of Gigya (see press release here), adding capabilities in access and identity management. Though the acquisition hasn’t closed, and executives were not allowed to make forward looking statement, it is clear Gigya will strengthen the SAP Hybris Profile. But it is only a start, more information needs to be collected, including (of course GDPR compliant) 3rdparty information.
 |
| The YaaS Agility Layer Concept |
YaaS goes to next level – SAP has been at the forefront of APIs with YaaS when the services were announced at Sapphire 2015. SAP is moving the developer centric message more to CxO decision makers, a good shift. SAP Hybris has also understood one of the fundamental issues of building a next generation application – once it is build, there is an integration problem (with the rest of the automation of the enterprise). SAP Hybris plans to address this with the SAP Hybris Agility Layer, allowing to combine the customer facing and back office systems in an elastic, non-monolithic way. A very good capability to have, that customers will welcome.
MyPOV
Overall a good user conference for SAP Hybris, that is growing and showing important functional extensions. Good demos with the Galaxy show floor tracking and VR visualization, the Charly conversational capabilities and the Pepper in store assistant were all well received and show that SAP Hybris has good plans on what is coming next. The shift from developer to executive for YaaS is a good one, at the end of the days it is CxOs who make the decision what to build in enterprises, get the budget and put their reputation (and career) on the line for that next generation application project. The plans around the SAP Hybris agility layer are very promising, solving not only the integration problem – but also create a non-monolithic platform connecting customer and core systems.
On the concern side, SAP Hybris is in the middle of a transformation on the platform side and at the same side customer best practices are changing. SAP overall is trying to capture this with its design thinking projects under the Leonardo umbrella, it is not clear how SAP Hybris is part of them. Equally missing is the overall SAP CRM vision and plans, something that always affects ecommerce plans, where SAP Hybris plays. Lastly SAP needs a 3rd party data and overall DaaS strategy, as customer acquisition and sentiment collected from first party data – will always remain only a fraction of the challenge ecommerce vendors have to solve.
But overall satisfactory progress by SAP Hybris. Sometimes user conferences come at a time that does not fit overall strategic positioning cycles, executive transition and product life cycles. We will need to check in at SAP Hybris live 2018 to get a better feel of innovation speed of vendor and readiness to uptake innovation by customers and prospects. Stay tuned.
Don't miss the Storify tweet collections summing up the days of SAP Hybris Live (here is day #1) - this is the day #2 keynote:
Don't miss the Storify tweet collections summing up the days of SAP Hybris Live (here is day #1) - this is the day #2 keynote: