Old genie in a new bottle

Sumit Bisht
Sep 7, 2018 · 2 min read

Sounds familiar, right ? ... now put the same analogy to software and you’ll see how enterprises ‘drive’ technology ahead.

I’ve been developing and supporting applications built using SAP Hybris since the last 4 years and have seen it move from a dedicated company driven tool (which was just another upcoming e-commerce tool) into being acquired by SAP and turned more into a CRM solution for their ERP systems.

During this period, I’ve seen changes in core technology being used and the introduction and removal of various features of the tool, but most importantly, it is the change that SAP acquisition brought into hybris since 2013, that jump-started its importance into the e-commerce technology club. Not only it is now touted as a CRM tool, but also is known as SAP C/4HANA (after a brief sojourn into SAP Hybris Commerce). So, while this posturing and branding may change, largely the underlying concepts are still the same; use of Spring as the core platform for enterprise java application and utilizing lesser known frameworks to build a backend system.

Hence, the genie syndrome... while the things may change a lot from business perspective viz naming, versioning, resource, etc. The underlying tool would be the same.

What we can takeaway from here: expected future releases would be drastically different — such as driving bigtime into cloud (which is long overdue, and also delayed partially after YaaS not being able to find many takers) that will reaffirm the importance of market significance of Hybris — instead of simply renaming the upgrading things.

Sumit Bisht

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A 31 year old full stack applications developer. Passionate about open source technologies and always curious about things around me.