What’s New Since HCL Acquired IBM WebSphere Commerce?
This summer will mark the two-year anniversary of HCL’s acquisition of a number of IBM products, including the eCommerce platform, WebSphere Commerce. Since July of 2019, a lot has happened. The overwhelming feedback we’ve received from our clients is that they are encouraged to see new features being added at a regular cadence and optimistic about the future of the platform.
“Watching what our team has been able to accomplish over the past year and a half by making the most of the on-going major investments, has been a whirlwind experience and it has been thrilling to be a part of this journey – it’s the whole reason I joined HCL Software. We’re so happy to be able to deliver improvements and innovation to the product that customers are excited about. Stay tuned for more!”
HCL has placed its focus on its customers with regular product roadmap updates, lab advocacy, transparent development approach, high-velocity releases, and hands-on account management. HCL has been open about its roadmap and has spent the first 18 months since the acquisition meeting the milestones laid out in that roadmap. Many of those improvements were suggestions that came directly from customers.
Here are some of the exciting enhancements to the HCL Commerce platform since the acquisition:
- World Class Experience – More control and more power for better customer experiences
- Complete rewrite of the business user tooling – all included in Management Center
- Two new React-based storefronts
- REST-based services for things like search data, orders, and member info to support a headless approach
- CMS & DAM as a pre-integrated optional add-on
- Optimized Merchandising – Capture and analyze behavioral data to sell more
- All new Commerce Search based on Elasticsearch
- Provide relevant search results based on customer behavior
- Voice-based product searches
- Out of the box integration with Google Analytics
- Cloud Native – Build and run scalable applications in public, private, and hybrid clouds
- Continued focus on enabling Cloud Native capabilities
- Enhanced HCL Cache powered by Redis for improved performance
- HCL announced Google Cloud partnership
HCL has been laser-focused on the success of its existing Commerce customers by listening to their challenges and striving to include improvements in the product based on that direct customer feedback. Also, BlueSky is a proud HCL business partner and we participate in the sponsor user program to provide feedback and guidance on the direction of the HCL Commerce platform.
HCL and BlueSky Commerce have focused on meeting with customers regularly to present the evolving roadmap and gathered continuous feedback. If you’d like to schedule a roadmap strategy session or discuss your needs further, email me.
