eCommerce powerhouse hybris recently announced the release of its new cloud platform: YaaS (“hybris as a Service”). Currently in beta, the platform is set to be launched at the end of August, 2015. YaaS is a completely new product, disconnected from the existing hybris Commerce Suite. It allows companies to build, connect, share, and market eCommerce-related micro-services. Its architecture is all based on RESTful micro-services, accessed and controlled by OAuth authentication. The platform already contains a set of core and commerce services: a document repository, a message queue service, an email service, product/category/cart/tax services, and a checkout mashup service, among others.
hybris recently held the first “YaaS Bootcamp” at Arvato Systems’ headquarters in New York City. For 3 days, several hybris partners participated in a hackathon to bring their best eCommerce ideas to the cloud.
The Arvato Systems team’s idea was to track a customer in a physical store with the use of iBeacons. Spread across the store, these little transmitters would broadcast their identifier to nearby smartphones. The shopper’s phone would then send notifications to a service in the cloud, to store and analyze the customers’ data and behavior.
To show the feasibility of this concept with YaaS, the team built and demoed an iBeacon “treasure hunt” in the Arvato Systems office. A “customer” that found a set of hidden iBeacons would get a free drink promotion tied to the room’s temperature: coffee for a cold temperature or beer for a hot one! The demo, presented in front of representatives from both hybris and SAP, was a great success! And since it is summertime, we all got plenty of cold refreshments…