Forrester on Digital Experience Delivery platforms

Forrester published a report on products supporting the digital customer experience life cycle. The picture below shows how Oracle defines this process:

 

Currently no product supports the entire cycle. Products partially supporting the cycle come from the Web Content Management and E-commerce market segments. Even if vendors have products supporting the entire cycle, the integration is not seamless.

Hybris and Adobe are seen as  strategic leaders. They are also partners.
Adobe, Hybris, SDL and Sitecore have the strongest offerings.
Oracle has the largest installed base but comes out remarkably weak in the evaluation, probably because it did not participate in this evaluation.

Hybris 5.2 released

Highlights

• Data Hub
• Punchout service 
• Expose Hybris catalog to integrate a storefront in third party procurement systems
• orders are integrated in procurement system
• Ariba procurement integration (used by > 1.5 million companies)
• Subscription enhancements
• Entitlement & Metering Management UI
• ...
• Revamped backoffice
• cockpits are perspectives in a uniform backoffice
• will replace the management console in the future
• B2B commerce accelerator enahcemed
• configurable and personalisable checkout flows
• ...
•  OCC (Omni Commecrce Connect) Webservices V2 preview
• trusted devices can manage users, carts, checkouts
• stateless calls
• Percona DB cluster support

Ingenico buys GlobalCollect

French payment terminal maker Ingenico has entered exclusive negotiations to buy Dutch online payment provider GlobalCollect for 820M€.
Last year Ingenico already acquired Belgian online payment provider Ogone for 360 M€.

Flemish libraries to lend e-books

In april 2014 Flemish libraries will start a pilot project to extend their offer with e-books. The initial pilot will run for a year and the catalog wil contain 300 titles.
You will be able to read them for free in the library.  For reading anywhere readers will be charged using the 345-model: maximum 3 ebooks fro maximum 4 weeks will cost €5.
The e-books will be readable using an app for Android and Apple. They will not be readable using an e-reader device, like Amazon Kindle, unless it can run Android apps. This limitation was needed to enforce the 345 lending model.
Here's a presentation for libraries that want to participate in the pilot project. Below is an infograph on ebooks ales evolution from 2011 => 2012, taken from the presentation:

Adidias NEO window dressing

My colleague Eytan pointed me to this Video on Adidas window shopping.
Adidas mounted a giant touch screen in front of the shopping window,
on which you can by goods using a tablet interface.
Looks great!

Hybris 5.0.1 released

New Accelerator feature highlights:

• Subscriptions (Telecommunications/Digital Accelerator):
• Define complex subscription offerings with combinations of one-time, recurring, and per-usage charges
• Manage multiple price periods
• Personalize pricing based on customer profile
• Manage subscription promotions by defining free trial or reduced price periods
• Integrate with the organization’s billing system
• Manage billing cycles (e.g., frequency, cycle type, cycle day)
• Define metered and non-metered entitlements and associate them with subscription products

• Order processing and delivery information Integrated with Store front (My account), Customer Service WebApp, email notification...
• Progressing uncollected Buy-Online-Pickup-In-Store orders
• Customers are reminded to pick up their orders if they forget
• If customers never show then the order is cancelled and a ticket is generated for the Customer Service representative to contact the customer and refund.

Hybris v5 new features (updated)

In march Hybris made an announcement of a new release. For a major version release the announcement was very low profile. It does not even say that it is a release at all, it just mentions some new features. Maybe they will make a more official announcement yet, who knows.
The release is much more about internals being updated than about radically new features, although there are some. Here's the stuff that caught ^my eye:

• Architecture
• New cockpit framework (a cockpit is a small web application directed at a specific task)
• made up of widgets: multichannel screens that may user multiple datasources
• Application Orchestrator: a graphical workflow tool to link widgets
• Accelerators now have Addons: extensions without modifying the accelerator codebase. They may contain frontend functions
• Mobile SDK
• HTML5
• sample apps with  GPS, camera, QR-code scanning, NFC...
• Clustering without multicast
• Better caching (EhCache default)
• Default lazy loading
• Media storage plugins + Cloud media support
• Graphical workflow preview
• Order Management Services (OMS) cockpit
• single inventory view (multi shop, multi shop)
• sourcing and allocation
• pick/pack/dispatch
• expected for V5.1
• return management
• back orders
• Commerce Infrastructure Services (CIS): 
• framework with pluggable payment, taxes, address verification, shipping, fraud detection, geolocation...
• third party plugins for various services
• InStore module: module providing services in brick and mortar stores
• QR code, barcode, NFC identification
• show rich product info
• access to stock and order management

SAP acquires hybris (updated)

German enterprise software builder SAP announced that it is acquiring the Hybris e-commerce platform.
From a product perspective this makes sense: e-commerce software always needs to be integrated with enterprise ERP/CRM backend systems. With the growth of e-commerce SAP needs this to offer an overall solution to its customers and its own WCEM (Web Channel Experience Management) was too limited and too much linked to the SAP backends. Of course we can expect SAP technology creeping into Hybris in the future, like strong integration with the SAP backends and SAP's im-memory HANA database.
Care should be taken that these integrations do not reduce fexibility. Software moloch SAP does not exactly fit Hybris' catch phrase agile e-commerce. Let's hope agility prevails

online retail trends (updated)

A recent report by the UK Center for Retail Research shows the expected rate of online retail increase. Increasing by 50% by 2018, almost one out of three non-food products will be bought online.

Retailer networks will need only 70 stores to cover the UK, compared to 250 in the mid 2000s.
Even the consumers that buy in brick go online to select the product they want to buy.

Here's what people are buying online (in Belgium). If you combine hotel and travel than holidays is the most important online sector.

In other countries the online retail market share is lower:

In Belgium, according to a study by retail organisation Comeos, the online retail market share is 3%. This is the level the Benelux market was at in 2008. If Belgium follows the global Benelux trend the market should double over the next four years.
Half of Belgian respondents prefers to buy in a Belgian webshop. 70% would like the goods to be delivered at home.

Upcoming features for Hybris 4.8

Next week a new minor 4.8 release is expected for the Hybris e-commerce platform.
This should be the last release before the major Hybris 5.0 release (expected Q2 2013).
Expected new features:

• Subsrciptions and bundling module
• recurring price models
• product bundles (e;g. sell entire digital publication or individual chapters and articles, sell mobile with phone contract)
• dynamic, rule based bundling and pricing
• cockpit: graphical dashboard for managing bundles and subscriptions
• great for any digital content provider(newspapers, platform subscriptions, eBooks, Steam-like online game buying...)
• New Telco accelerators, built on subscription and bundling module. An accelerator is a prebuilt Hybris application targeted at a specific market.
• B2B accelerator mobile front

QR code shopping

Uniway adds QR codes to TV shopping program.
You can consult product info on your smartphone and get called by the call center to take your order.

Belgian ticket shop Olympic Games 2012 down

Belgian tickets for the London Olympic games are sold through an online webshop by Suseia.
The sale started last tuesday night, but could not service the load. It was taken off line and restarted the next morning with doubled capacity. After the relaunch it still had problems and produced all kinds of errors in the sales process.
The site is now taken offline for more than a month to correct the problems.
Suseia does not want to disclose the name of the company that built the shop.
According to a tweet by JF Hovinne, a freelancer and working for Vox Teneo, the site was built with Drupal.

Google to introduce micropayment links

According to La Repubblica Google is developing a pay-per-click system, for visiting indexed links, called Newspass. Content propviders will be able to offer text, images and video that is found and payed through Google.

7500 users sell their soul online

From the legal conditions of GameStation:
By placing an order via this Web site on the first day of the fourth month of the year 2010 Anno Domini, you agree to grant Us a non transferable option to claim, for now and for ever more, your immortal soul. Should We wish to exercise this option, you agree to surrender your immortal soul, and any claim you may have on it, within 5 (five) working days of receiving written notification from gamestation.co.uk or one of its duly authorised minions.