We’re nearing the 3-year anniversary of HCL Commerce’s acquisition of WebSphere Commerce from IBM. Since 2019, HCL Commerce has steadied the platform on a path to success, collecting feedback from valued customers and partners, to foster cutting-edge continuous improvement.
A lot has happened over the past 3 years. BlueSky Commerce shared an update in March of 2021. Now, a year later, we continue to look at what HCL Commerce has promised vs. delivered to improve its world-class eCommerce solution.
Here is a comprehensive list of what has been promised and delivered over the past 3 years as well as what is to come in the 2022 roadmap.
HCL Commerce Enhancements Promised & Delivered in 2020:
- World-Class Experience
- Management Center: Approval requests, Registries, Security Policies, Shipping Modes, Shipping Jurisdictions, Tax Categories, Tax Codes, Tax Jurisdictions tools, B2C User Management, Shipping Charges tools, Shipping Codes, Messaging, and TransportsNew Shopping Storefronts for B2B and B2C
- New Ideas can be submitted from Management Center
- Accelerator and Org Admin functionality moving to Management Center
- Continue to upgrade REST services to level 3 maturity
- Updates to Data Load Tool
- Additional React store pages
- User Management and Approvals in B2B React store
- Contract Ts&Cs in React Store
- Content Management provided via HCL DX
- Assets: Integrate with Avalara, PayPal, and Google AI APIs (e.g. Barcode scanner, Image search, Voice search, commerce IoT devices)
- Optimized Merchandising
- Elasticsearch with Natural Language Processing
- Enable NLP Context
- Provide ingest pipeline capabilities into Elasticsearch for augmenting search data
- Improve Merchandising capabilities for products with variations with a 3-tier model
- HCL Search: Oracle Database support and NLP Languages added: Chinese, French, German and Spanish, color matching in search results, NRT for data load, fallback language for non-translated products
- HCL Commerce + Google Analytics
- HCL Discover Integration
- Assets: Integrate with Google Pay, Apple Pay, CyberSource
- Cloud-Native Commerce
- Continue to replace legacy solutions with cloud-native technologies
- GCP “Ready”
- OpenShift “Ready”
- Anthos “Ready”
- Automated deployment to GCP
- Short-term deploys of all Commerce containers into a “sandbox” environment
HCL Commerce Enhancements Promised & Delivered in 2021:
- World-Class Experience
- CSR Capability in Storefront
- Improved native commerce dashboards
- SSO between HCL Commerce and HCL CMS
- Enable Assets Tool in CMC
- Search Stability Improvements for Customers going Live
- Optimized Merchandising
- HCL Commerce Search in Workspaces
- Reduce Search Deployment Time
- Update CKEditor
- Cloud-Native Commerce
- OneDB Support (Beta & Production)
- Certify deployment on Amazon Kubernetes Service
- HCL Now for Commerce
- Deploy HCL Commerce with OneDB on SoFy
- OneDB migration support from DB2/Oracle
- WAS Alternative PoC
- GraphQL Support
- Certifications: Google Anthos, Azure and OpenShift
- Sales & Business Model
- Multiple Shipment (Checkout Capabilities)
- Multiple quick checkout profiles
- Multi-User order collaboration
- Purchase order validation / spend levels
- Multiple payments
- Improved Search NiFi ingest, Performance, and Index Generation
- Business & User Experience
- Page Builder capabilities – React storefronts
- New Search Tooling for Ranking and Color Match Making
- Order History Page Updates
- Page Composer Improvements
- Performance & Scalability
- Search Performance Improvements
- Kubernetes scale-out capabilities & performance benchmarking
HCL Commerce Enhancements Promised & Delivered in 2022:
- Sales & Business Model
- Native Marketplace Preview
- Business & User Experience
- Marketplace tooling Beta
- Performance & Scalability
- Upgrade to RAD 9.7
- POC: CentOS Alternatives
- Cloud-Native
- HCL Link integration (Product Feed from Catalog)
- Update REST Services for Store Name and StoreID
2022 HCL Commerce Enhancements Roadmap
- Sales & Business Model
- Native Marketplace GA
- Order brokering
- Additional Marketplace Capabilities (sellers specify fulfillment, complex pricing)
- Business & User Experience
- Marketplace tooling GA (Vendor interface, vendor onboarding, etc.)
- Consolidated Search Index Build across extended sites
- Search, sort, and reorder from previous orders
- Save a search
- CSR post-order capabilities
- RFQ and Quotes
- Improved Approvals
- Additional Search tool use cases
- Performance & Scalability
- Store-specific session timeout
- Cloud-Native
- Inter-server communication w/o SSL
- OpenLiberty containers
“For BlueSky Commerce, we have a long history with HCL Commerce and before that, IBM. That history dates back to the initial product launch by IBM in 1997. As you can imagine, we have a lot invested in subject matter expertise to consult, implement, enhance and support HCL Commerce and we have a large portfolio of clients that have equally invested. So to see HCL Commerce delivering on the promise to their product roadmap time and time again has validated HCL Commerce with us and our clients, and that has produced a win, win, win relationship”
If HCL Commerce’s track record is any indication, we can expect to see some exciting improvements in the marketplace and search capabilities, business and user experience, performance, scalability, and cloud-native delivered yet in 2022.
If there is a feature you would like to see reflected in the HCL Commerce solution, click here to let us know. We’d be happy to work with you and HCL to ensure your desired functionality is considered for the future.
