SAP moves to a composable commerce offering

Global software giant SAP has announced a new Commerce Cloud composable offering, providing merchants new levels of flexibility and a range of choices between the complete Commerce Cloud package and specific applications and services. SAP is also announcing new headless composable storefronts for verticals including financial services, travel, telecommunications and the public sector in addition to its existing offerings for retail, consumer products, distribution and manufacturing.

SAP is also highlighting its partnership program for Commerce Cloud, including Contentful for content creation, Coveo for AI-driven product recommendations and Akeneo for PIM and product experience management.

Why we care. This is a new stage on the SAP commerce journey, which began essentially with the acquisition of ecommerce vendor Hybris ten years ago. Hybris became SAP Hybris and then evolved into SAP Commerce Cloud, part of a broader CX suite.

The new initiative reflects a growing trend towards composability in the digital experience and commerce space as businesses with different levels of digital maturity, different products and services, and an ever-diversifying range of channels in which to meet customers, are seeing the limitations of being locked into traditional, all-in-one solutions.

A federated approach to offering services, combined with large partner networks, is bringing much greater flexibility to commerce offerings.

Dig deeper: Sitecore adds new products to its composable DXP

All-in-one versus composable. Comprehensive buy-in to Commerce Cloud secures a wide range of services including order management, PIM, content management, personalization and engagement tools. Not every business needs all of these services from their commerce provider of choice — or not all of them at the same time.

By choosing among SAP and partner applications served on the Commerce Cloud platform, SAP customers can create their own agile, highly customized commerce solutions.

SAP is also flagging these announcements as reaffirming its commitment to the digital commerce and CX categories.