How Hybris became SAP Commerce Cloud
Have you lost yourself in the SAP Commerce jungle amongst different products, versions and new names? The big question that you might ask yourself is; How did Hybris become SAP Commerce Cloud? Let’s start from the beginning and clarify some things.
Hybris was founded in Zug, Switzerland in 1997 as an independent e-commerce platform and evolved to become a strong brand in the field. SAP, the German enterprise software giant, had seen Hybris rise to fame and popularity and also other competitors quickly launching e-commerce options and realized how important this segment was to become. This led up to SAP acquiring the rapidly growing Hybris back in 2013. Before that, SAP actually did an attempt at an own e-commerce solution, called SAP Web Channel Experience Management, but it was soon surpassed by the new player in the game. So by this time Hybris was just the name of SAP’s latest obtained e-commerce platform. But, this is when things start to get a bit confusing.
The original Hybris software was named SAP Hybris Commerce and became a part of the new platform SAP Customer Engagement and Commerce (CEC) as the e-commerce solution. Included were also SAP’s own solutions SAP Cloud for Sales, Service, Marketing and Social. The idea was to unify all the solutions that enterprises value when interacting with their customers with the new e-commerce platform. Thereafter the Hybris brand name was applied to all the solutions within the platform (e.g. SAP Hybris Cloud for Marketing). So what’s important to understand is that just because the solutions now had Hybris in their name, the new additions were not actually originating from the swiss e-commerce platform Hybris. SAP Hybris Commerce is the only solution that has this history.
In 2018 SAP decided to drop the Hybris Brand name completely which meant that SAP Hybris Commerce was renamed SAP Commerce. With the rise of cloud solutions and customers worldwide starting to migrate on-premise solutions to the cloud, SAP started to offer hosting of SAP Commerce in the cloud, hence we arrive at the name of today: SAP Commerce Cloud. The renaming also affected SAP’s own solutions, which once again were renamed. SAP’s suite of CRM solutions is now called SAP Customer Experience Suite which includes the following; SAP Commerce Cloud (former Hybris), SAP Marketing Cloud, SAP Customer Data Cloud, SAP Sales Cloud and SAP Service Cloud.Even today, developers working with SAP Commerce Cloud on their local systems will see “Hybris” all over the place, in source code and in the backend. Hence, it’s no wonder the name Hybris continues to live on and is still a household name in the e-commerce industry despite that we actually should be talking about SAP Commerce Cloud nowadays.
