“What is the best database for large eCommerce websites, and why?” was a question I saw on Quora. This question is important because managing data within your eCommerce website plays a pivotal role in delivering positive user experiences and providing smooth transactions. It doesn’t matter how well your eCommerce website interface is designed and how nice the products/services look. It will be worthless unless the eCommerce website has the performance to quickly retrieve, process, and deliver information. 

When’s the last time you or your operations team were able to deploy an entire, fully functional, enterprise-grade suite of applications for your organization to tryout within one day?* * Sometimes actually less than an hour. AND you need zero technical knowledge, cost or commitment, but instead you can just kick back with a glass of whatever and watch your entire Kubernetes cluster spin up in front of your eyes within hours, AND there’s a cloud native container orchestration app that you can visually monitor the health of all your nodes with Grafana charts, and its completely free for any customer of any product in said suite? Yeah, me neither! Not until I had the honor to spend the last year and a half working with the HCL Solutions Factory team here at HCL Software. What this team has done for our solution delivery capability is almost too difficult to draw a comparison to. It is truly a paradigm shift for cloud native software delivery. In this article, I will introduce you to what we have been cooking up for the last five years and how it will radically improve your competitive footing. Our incredibly talented team of modernization experts have gone all-in on cloud native tech to bring the world SoFy, the HCL Solutions Factory. Think of SoFy as the Netflix of enterprise software. First and foremost, it is an incredibly friendly catalog of all the HCL Software titles – pre-containerized and ready to deploy to public cloud sandboxes in literal minutes. What once took weeks with expensive experts, can now be done by the most non-technical users on their phone while sitting in Starbucks. It's seriously that easy. If that was all SoFy was, it would still be a game-changer, but we didn't stop there! The SoFy team...

  The Paradigm B2B Enterprise and Mid-market reports are live! This in-depth vendor analysis is a dedicated assessment of the top ecommerce platforms in the B2B space led by Andy Hoar, a long-time analyst and influencer in the B2B ecommerce space. Andy and his team conducted extensive research including live demonstrations with Q&A, interviews with customers and more to ensure a comprehensive and accurate reflection of the platforms’ capabilities. HCL Commerce medaled almost as much as Michael Phelps! We received medals in 8 out of 10 categories for both the Mid-market and Enterprise reports, a significant improvement over the 2020 reports where we received medals in 5 out of 10 categories. We also increased the quality of our medals from 4 bronze and 1 silver in 2020 to 3 bronze, 4 silvers and a gold! I think the biggest story is to come out of this is that Andy (and the analyst community) is starting to see the improvements we are making in our platform and the fundamental benefits inherent in cloud-native commerce. The proof is in the pudding as they say and by showing Andy what’s possible and having our clients tell him how powerful the platform is, we’ve seen the positive outcome in the 2021 report. Below are some of the areas Andy highlighted for HCL Commerce: 1. Handles complexity well 2. Ability to create custom catalogs 3. Facility for spinning up and managing dealer sites 4. Strong promotions functionality 5. Mature back-end interfaces and punchout- related workflows And a great quote directly from Andy: “Customers spoke highly of HCL Commerce’s platform stability and performance with one customer calling it “very powerful.” Some clients commented about HCL’s limited independent partner footprint, underpowered functionality in a few key product areas (e.g., PIM, OMS), and the measurable effort that can...

Managing the implementation and long-term ownership of multiple solutions to support each model would be a maintenance nightmare! Instead, select a platform that supports all these models out of the box and position your business for future expansion.

As more and more business in both the B2B and B2C space is driven through the digital commerce platform, it is imperative that organizations ensure their web sites maintain the performance and reliability required to deliver great customer experiences.

Quadrant Solutions is an emerging analyst organization, who has their finger on the pulse of commerce. Read blog for more details.