HCL and Zobrist Software were excited to bring our latest Virtual Connect User Session to all of you last week. This is the first session in our Virtual series designed to encourage an exchange of ideas and transparency with HCL Commerce product management team.
For those that could not attend, we’ve published this summary of the event below and HCL has made the recorded webinar available here:
HCL and Zobrist Software are supportive partners in bringing these events to you. We look forward to providing you with continued education, training, and user experiences through future online meetups.
Introduction
HCL’s Director of Product Management, Commerce – Brian Gillespie, hosted this session and opened with an introduction to HCL, for many who were not aware of the $9 billion company’s long-standing relationship with IBM. HCL is bullish on the future of e-commerce and is investing heavily; it plans to expand its one-thousand-person team by 25% or more over two years.
HCL hints at V9.1 and new features
Among the comprehensive list of features and functions HCL is going to deliver, it’s important to note that 9.1 Release is coming in June 2020 with three main themes: Customer Experience, Merchandising, and Cloud Native. With the release of its REST APIs, HCL Commerce continues its headless journey and will be releasing React-based storefront with integration to DX. For merchandising, ElasticSearch will replace Solr as a highly anticipated search engine. Additionally, OpenNLP will provide Natural Language Processing, and Cloud architecture will continue to be enhanced.
The Bishop Company Shares Migration Success
Keith McCormick of The Bishop Company shared his fears, trepidation, and ultimate successes in making a smooth transition migrating to V9 from on-prem to cloud. Bishco.com has been running on V9 on AWS since August. Keith was glad to join the cloud movement, and V9 architecture made it easy. There were latency challenges with moving the commerce server to the cloud away from the ERP on iSeries; however, issues were quickly resolved by iSeries connection pooling and proper pricing calculations. Lastly, Keith shared his favorite enhancements in the new HTML-based Management Center and continued to be delighted with the page loading speed of Mobiecom, the React-based storefront built by Zobrist Software in 2018.
Avoiding Technical Issues in V9 migration
Teresa Zobrist, CEO of Zobrist Software, revealed some known technical issues that are occurring during V9 migration. In following the InfoCenter Migration Guide, a few processes are either missing or wrong; but can be resolved. There is a learning curve with cloud technologies such as Docker containers, Kubernetes, and JPAs, but we are sure glad to see the future of DevOps. CloudOps, here we come!
If you would like to know more about the User Group and how to get involved, you can contact us by emailing info@zobristinc.com.
