Are you looking to go the composable route on SAP Commerce Cloud? Have you been thinking about composable but not too sure if it’s right for your business?
We held a webinar with our partners Contentful, Coveo, and SAP to talk about what we have created by coming together to form the Ascend Extension for the SAP Commerce Cloud. Here’s a bit of what you missed:
SAP’s Perspective on Composability
SAP is selective with microservices, only using them when they stand to benefit their customers. They call this a ‘hybrid’ or ‘fit for purpose’ approach. It’s their belief that composable commerce is the future of the market if done pragmatically. Commerce Cloud was the start of their journey to set up the architecture to support composability.
When it comes to composability SAP focuses on:
- Composing at your own pace
- Innovating rapidly with modern, cloud-native extensibility
- Transforming faster with industry-specific capabilities
- Augmenting core capabilities with pre-integrated best-of-breed partners
SAP’s composable solution is a good fit for 90% of businesses as going fully composable through microservices isn’t realistic for most businesses. This is why Ascend uses the ‘best-of-need’ approach.
Ascend SAP Commerce Cloud Composable Extension
Smith has recently announced the Ascend SAP Commerce Cloud Composable Extension. It’s a set of flexible extensions that fast-track composability for SAP Commerce Cloud with pre-built:
- Integrations
- Data models
- Extension points
- UI Components
This extension allows B2B businesses to drive an incremental and non-invasive approach to composing a best-of-need solution. Ascend initially integrates SAP Commerce Cloud with Coveo (product discovery and personalization) and Contentful (content management), but Ascend’s extensible composition forms a foundation that can be adapted to create unique solutions for every business.
Current Contentful Capabilities in the Ascend extension:
- Full page and individual entity integration
- Responsive homepage UI Components
- PDP related content
- Category page related content
Current Coveo Capabilities in the Ascend extension:
- Keyword search
- Product listing pages
- Product recommendation carousels
Being a Composable extension, Ascend enables extreme flexibility on how a business uses the extension. This allows you to focus on creating incremental business value, instead of trying to reach the end goal right away. This allows companies to achieve positive ROI faster and lower operating costs over the long-term.
Consider these takeaways when considering a composable solution:
Incremental is key – The path to composable doesn’t require a total re-platform. Being able to move to composable in incremental steps, unlocks value faster without disrupting your business.
Have a feature-focused approach – Closely match end-customer needs to tech capabilities to avoid delivering an underperforming commerce experience or one with features that end-customers do not need to complete their objectives efficiently.
Have the right tech for the right job – There are a lot of technologies to choose from when building a commerce solution. Composable allows businesses the flexibility to adapt changing customer needs, market conditions, or business strategy.
Watch the full webinar, which includes a deeper dive on Contentful and Coveo capabilities as part of a composable solution. Find the webinar here.