It’s a wrap and the HCL Commerce Customer Summit Delivered!
Our first HCL Commerce Customer Summit finished up last week and the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. A huge thanks to our customers, partners, guest speakers and the HCL team for bringing 3 days of jam-packed content covering World-Class Experiences, Optimized Merchandising and Cloud Native Commerce.
Across 14 sessions, we heard from customers like Abercrombie & FItch, Follett, General Motors, and DFS as they shared the benefits they’ve seen since upgrading to V9 – from significant increases to revenue and conversion rates to decreases in page load times, innovation cycle times and the confidence to make changes regularly. It was clear that the conclusion from all of them was – it is a no-brainer to upgrade to V9.
“[we] moved from 6-8 releases a year to weekly releases”
“V9 has opened up so many doors the possibilities are really limitless. We’re only limited by our imagination.”
“On boxing day I haven’t been worried about it and that’s mainly due to the scalability of v9.”
We also heard from our newest partners and technology leaders from Google and Elasticsearch as they shared their excitement for the immediate opportunities the partnership is delivering as well as the future possibilities – so much more to explore there!
We’ve included a recap of each session with a link to it in case you missed it live, or if you just want to re-watch anything.
Day 1 – World Class Experience
An awesome start to our Customer Summit! Day one was absolutely packed with great content, customer stories and live demos of 9.1.
Gary Schoch, GM of HCL Commerce kicked things off with a big thank you to our customers and partners for their support and help as we leapt into our first year as HCL Commerce. But we thankfully yanked the mic out of his hands and gave it to the capable hands of Sierra Bhatia to drive a live demo of 9.1 showcasing a number of new features, including things like voice-based product searches and some great user tooling improvements. HCL Commerce Summit Welcome
From there we turned it over to the customers. Follett, General Motors and DFS shared their path to V9, why they upgraded and the significant benefits they’ve seen from the move, from dramatic increases in conversions and revenue to equally dramatic reductions in deployment times and overall effort in managing and maintaining their environments. Follett, DFS & GM Customer Talk
Paul Miller, formerly the digital commerce leader at Williams & Sonoma, Sears, and Grainger, then joined us to share his insight on how B2B and B2C commerce is changing as new expectations and requirements are set – finishing with a discussion between him, Gary Schoch and Brian Gillespie, Director of Product Management for HCL Commerce where they dove deeper into the key issues facing commerce today. Commerce in the New Normal
For an expanded panel, we invited back our customer speakers to engage with Paul and our HCL team, sharing how they are embracing the new normal and tackling the challenges it brings – transforming their organizations to be digital first, understanding how to build compelling customer experiences and much more! Commerce Fundamentals
Finally, we closed the day with a review of our hackathon participants and their amazing project submissions showing the power of HCL Commerce’s API-first approach, demonstrated through custom-built voice-based search applications. Congratulations to our winners Sirius and HP! Hackathon Results
Day 2 – Optimized Merchandising
It was always going to be tough to follow the amazing energy of day one that ran throughout our sessions and our customer sessions in particular. But day two exceeded our expectations as we dove deep on one of the hottest topics in commerce – Search. Kicking off the day Brian Gillespie, Director of Product Management and Laura Apostoloiu, Director of Engineering spoke to our roadmap in both the near term and long term – highlighting how customers are driving the process and the goals. Commerce Roadmap
George Kobar, Elasticsearch evangelist, featured next for a keynote on search and why it is the lynchpin for a great customer experience. George shared the effects good and bad search experiences have on an organizations digital commerce success with powerful statistics. You can not sleep on good search experiences or you will lose to your competition. Keynote – the Future of Search
Building on George’s keynote, we then brought in a panel to talk specifically about search and its current impact on digital commerce. George was joined by Baron Lam of Bluesky, Rick Miller of Zilker and Brian Gillespie, Director of Product Management for HCL Commerce to share their experiences and expertise on delivering search solutions for B2B and B2C companies and what end-customers are looking for and expecting from search. How Search is Changing the Customer Experience
To round out our day of search, Daniel Dunn, Senior Architect HCL Commerce, Martin Tavener, CTO EMEA HCL Commerce, and Rhett Daniel, Advisory Services HCL Commerce gave us a primer on search – sharing best practices, tips and ways to get the most from your search. This will be a great ongoing resources and more companies adopt V9.1 and want to leverage the embedded Elasticsearch capabilities to ensure they are creating great customer experiences. Search Primer
So how do you follow two days of excellent content? You bring in a global name and your new strategic partner, Google Cloud. Pallab Deb, Head Partner Solutions & AI Partnerships, Google Cloud joined us to discuss what Google Cloud enables companies to do within commerce, leveraging their secure, reliable and scalable cloud solution, not to mention all of the related Google applications. The Power of Google Cloud for Commerce
A&F underwent a digital transformation centered around their adoption of V9. Watch Eric Johnson, Group Vice President IT, Abercrombie & Fitch share the how and why around their decision to upgrade to V9 and how it is paying dividends for their business. Abercrombie & Fitch, A Tale of Two Journeys
Staying focused on cloud native, we brought in experts to speak about cloud native commerce and why it’s a better approach for digital commerce, focusing on the benefits, best practices and other tips & tricks. Watch Eric Johnson, Group VP of IT at Abercrombie & Fitch, Mike Rabbior, Chief Strategist at Perficient, Glen Burson, CTO at Wunderman Thompson Commerce and Stephanie Heyward, Director of Advisory Services at HCL Commerce as they share their perspectives. Best Practices on Cloud Native and V9 Adoption
Learn more about a new HCLSoftware application called Solution Factory (SoFy) and how you can leverage it to quickly deploy HCLSoftware technologies into containers. How to Spin Up a New Site in Seconds
V9.1 offers a whole lot more than what we’ve been focusing on over the last three days. In this session we go into the rest of the release and tease out the features and benefits being offered “Beyond the WOWs” to show you how much value there is in our latest release. Beyond the WOWs
