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About this episode
Technology constantly evolves and there’s a lot of talk in the industry about modern architecture vs. monolithic systems. There’s a clear trend towards decoupling legacy systems and creating a flexible system design based on APIs, microservices and cloud-based technology. One of the core goals of this approach is to enable unified commerce, where different parts of the system connect seamlessly to deliver the required customer experience.
Demystifying unified commerce
However, with all changes comes new jargon and often the conversation adds complexity rather than simplifying the message. Unified commerce sounds simple but we need to understand the business challenges to reach the promised land. Moving away from large legacy systems often presents a risk, a step into the relatively unknown for many organisations. There are valid concerns around stability, scalability and performance.
On today’s episode we’re providing practical insights to help people not only understand the terminology but grasp the practical applications & benefits for ecommerce. Our focus is on microservices and packaged business capabilities, which are essentially compilations of services to deliver business functionality (part of the unified commerce vision).
Gartner defines packaged business capabilities (or PBCs) as “software components representing a well-defined business capability. Having recently worked with market leading vendor Spryker and been impressed with their platform, we reached out to get an explanation of the business benefit of microservices and PBCs.
For our 82nd episode, we’re joined by Boris Lokschin, CEO of Spryker, & Michael Vax, Founder of Commerce is Digital consultancy and who works closely with Spryker. Boris and Michael have supported a wide range of businesses on their path to unified commerce using the Spryker cloud-native platform.
Some of the core areas covered in this podcast include:
- Spryker is positioned as a unified commerce platform; there’s a lot of jargon in our industry, so what does unified really mean?
- What are the most common business challenges you see with retailers who aren’t using a unified solution and what impact does it have?
- What are the key features/capabilities that make an ecommerce platform unified?
- Key to your unified offering is the concept of PBCs – let’s do some jargon busting, what is a PBC and how does it differ to a microservice?
- Can you give examples of standard & custom PBCs?
- Many of the so called monoliths have invested in opening up their platforms via API; what can APIs alone not achieve that microservices and PBCs can?
- Can you give some practical ecommerce examples of what a merchant has been able to achieve using PBCs rather than just coding?
- Analysts like Gartner have spoken about PBCs reducing the TCO of technology; how is this achieved?
