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by Brian K. Walker

Endeca Technologies and hybris have recently announced a joint product offering. This joint offering combines Endeca’s Information Access Platform (IAP) with hybris’ e-Commerce Suite including the hybris eCommerce platform and product information management (PIM) solution. Looks like this combined product will go by the name “Endeca Commerce Suite” in North America.

I recently had a chance to sit down for a briefing with the Endeca and hybris teams to discuss the joint offering and explore what it means for our clients. A few key takeaways and thoughts:

  • This joint offering holds the opportunity for Endeca to more fully realize their product’s potential in eCommerce. For many years, Endeca’s clients have been challenged to take full advantage of the product due to integration challenges with their data sources and eCommerce platforms. This has limited the level of merchandising, targeting, and navigation innovation Endeca’s clients have been able to explore and use in their online customer experience. By integrating their product with a leading eCommerce platform and PIM solution, Endeca now has the potential to remove these barriers and thereby push the envelope of their products’ capabilities — in order to deliver a truly dynamic and guided selling application. The opportunity is there for them to finally unlock the potential to combine structured data (product and customer), unstructured data (Web and creative assets), and real time interactions for their clients.
  • This joint offering helps hybris establish their presence in the North America. Hybris is an established and well-respected solution in Central Europe, but a lack of North American presence or relationships with system integrators has limited their ability to be seriously considered by American or Canadian clients. With this partnership, Endeca will be selling and supporting the hybris solution in North America; together, they will be forging relationships with leading system integrators to support implementations of their joint product.
  • Similarly, this partnership will help Endeca in Europe. In Europe, hybris will be packaging the Endeca product to serve as an added component to their eCommerce merchandising and search capabilities. While known, Endeca has struggled to gain the traction in Europe they have enjoyed in the North American market as they complete with the likes of Omikron, Fredhopper, and Celebros.
  • On the flip-side, this may affect Endeca as a go-to “after-market” search and merchandising engine. Endeca has been a strategic partner for years with other leading eCommerce platform providers, such as IBM, ATG, Fry, and Microsoft. For years, clients and prospects of these (and other) platforms have heard that “you can integrate Endeca if you need it.” While still true, there is likely to be less friendly cooperation as Endeca now offers a competing product.

For our clients evaluating solutions it is important to know that it may take 6 to 12 months before hybris and Endeca, working together, truly present a joint product with tight and robust integration. Similarly, it will take time for them to develop a range of system integrators fully prepared to implement these joint solutions. By combining Endeca’s strong search and merchandising product with hybris’ strong PIM and eCommerce platform the potential is there for this to be a strong candidate for B2B and B2C enterprise platform projects in the future. I, for one, certainly look forward to evaluating the solution as it evolves.

If you are a client with access and have further questions, please do not hesitate to reach out to me through our inquiry process to discuss further. Also, for more on hybris see our B2C eCommerce Platform Wave report, and for more on Endeca please see our Enterprise Search Wave.

Thanks, Brian

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