Apr 12, 2012, 9:08am

hybris, a leading provider of multichannel commerce and communication software, today announced the availability of hybris 4.6 with Omni Commerce Connect (OCC). Offering a broad set of commerce and data services, OCC enables users to leverage the complete hybris Multichannel Suite functionality anywhere in an existing application landscape. Its new functionalities help merchants overcome the three fundamental commerce challenges: speed of innovation outside of their organization, channel-driven processes that fail to scale and process-heavy IT.

According to a recent report by Forrester¹, the open Web will result in a second web economy that will eclipse the first Internet economy in size and scope. Fueled by companies such as Apple, Samsung, Facebook and Foursquare, speed of innovation is progressing at a staggering rate.

“With the incredible growth in innovation, customer adoption is on a rapid rise, which includes consumers and buyers purchasing from other enterprises,” said Ariel Lüdi, CEO of hybris. “This causes commerce challenges to be magnified and exposed by demanding customers who are empowered with new devices, better know-how about the competition, and knowledge made available by the Internet. Enterprises of any kind are simply struggling to keep up with the exponential growth of customer touch points.”

The hybris OCC is a new machine-to-machine interface, helping merchants mitigate these challenges in the following ways:

• Plug & Play commerce processes easily integrates into existing commerce infrastructure - Technology agnostic, hybris OCC allows enterprises to add new, missing functionality efficiently and quickly by connecting hybris with other - including non-hybris - software packages. hybris OCC is the ideal tool for creating a commerce hub for exposing all existing commerce functionality to other systems and platforms.
• Reuse business process and data across touch points – Processes and software in many organizations have been built with the channel, not the customer in mind and often lack the functionality required in today’s omni-channel world. Since the interface is universal in its usage and not just restricted to human user interface, it can easily integrate with other systems and even provide interfaces to partners and other organizations. With hybris OCC, enterprises can offer faster and cheaper new transactional interfaces to their customers.
• Leverage an army of external developers - hybris OCC provides external IT developers with simplified access to commerce processes and data without requiring the developers to understand the minute details of each business. This speeds up the development process while reducing pressure on internal IT personnel, whose function is not typically dedicated to building user interfaces.

In addition to OCC, hybris 4.6 also includes enhanced search and navigation to assist with merchandising and drive sales. hybris supports leading search engines and 4.6 delivers out-of-the-box integration with Google Commerce Search. This enables retail organizations to deliver Google’s latest innovations in search and navigation technology with an experience tailored specifically to online product discovery.

hybris 4.6 is immediately available and further details can be found at: http://www.hybris.com/release46

About hybris

hybris is a leading vendor of next generation end-to-end multichannel commerce software based on a single platform including managed and hosting services. Its clear vision about the need for consistency, coordination and personalization of information across all channels and throughout all phases of the customer lifecycle has resulted in the development of an integrated, agile solution enabling businesses to communicate and sell across all channels – online and offline - in a consistent and effective way. hybris has 14 offices around the world located in the economic capitals of North/South America, Europe and Asia and supports over 380 global customers. Customers are brands from retail and manufacturing industries, including: Bobcat, Clarks, Coca Cola Beverages, Conrad, Grundfos, Hornbach, Iomega, Kaiser+Kraft, Levi´s, Lufthansa, Migros, Nespresso, Nikon, P&G, Rexel, Timberland and Toys´R´Us.

¹ Here Comes The Open Web — Embrace It (January 24, 2012)