Hi This is Teresa Zobrist, CEO of Zobrist Software Group Inc. I am super excited to discuss how you can future-proof your investment of IBM WebSphere Commerce.
There are 3 topics I am going to cover today:
- WCS V9 Migration (How you should prepare for it)
- Headless Commerce (New concept and how you should leverage this in V9)
- Mobiecom ( a screaming-fast storefront to support the Headless Commerce Concept)
IBM announced End of Support for WCS V7 in April 2019 If You are on V7, you need to plan your migration NOW as time is ticking away. How much will migration cost you? How many resources will it take? How long will it take? Besides compliance and IBM support, what are the benefits of V9 that you can articulate to your executive?
Benefits of V9 include:
- A Modernized architecture for future growth and innovation
- Based on a microservice approach that allows better scaling
- An Exernalized Customization model – better isolation of code
- A set of Docker images provided to you for better installation
- Automated deployment with CI/CD pipelines
If we look back at the architecture for V7 and V8, We can see that the Presentation Layer, the Control Layer, the Business Logic layer and the Persistence layer are all bundled into a monolithis application And what that means is that it’s going to be very hard for IBM to update their code without affecting your code.
In the new V9 architecture, IBM delivers Microservices in the form of 4 servers: Transaction Server (this is the commerce engine), the Store Server (which contains your storefront assets), the Search server and the Externalized Customization server.
To ensure a Smooth Migration, we recommend that:
- You understand the options available to you so you can decide what to do
- And then Plan your budget and resources accordingly
IBM has a number of migration tools available to you:
- Database migration
- Commerce Management Center CMC migtation
- EJB to JPA conversion
- Search migration guide
- Migrate your configuration file and data guide
And you need to know that Sales Center is NOT supported in V9 so you need to make provision for that. So if you think about this, there is a lot of work that goes into a migration. What other value-adds could we articulate to the business?
Well, if we look at it from a Headless Commerce perspective, there are 2 huge benefits:
- Scalability at a Microservice Level
- You can add a High Performance Storefront to your WebSphere investment
Scaling at a microservice level means that you can scale what you need instead of scaling the entire platform. For example, if you need to handle more traffic, you can scale your storefront, search and xC server without scaling your Transaction Server because you have less demand on check out.
The second benefit of a Headless Commerce is that you can hook it up to a High Performance storefront. Who needs a High-Performance Storefront? We all do.
- 1 second delay cost $2.5M in lost sales for a $100K daily revenue website
- 53% mobile visitors will bounce if load time exceeds 3 seconds
- 100ms delay hurts conversion by 7%
Introducing Mobiecom
- Single Page Application developed in React JS
- Storefront code runs in the Browser
- Data is cached between Requests
- Rendering is offloaded from Server
- Providing a mobile-app like experience
Here are our recommended 3 Steps to a Blazing Fast website:
- Discovery Step where we get together with you to truly understand your Goal and Objectives
- Diagnosis Step where we look at the customizations you have made to truly understand your Unique Challenges
- Design Step where we combine your requirements with what is already available in Mobiecom to come up with a mobile-optimized site for you
Never MISS a Sales Due to Poor Speed. Here’s a quick demo of Mobiecom versus Aurora storefront, running in a 3G network to amplify the user experience for mobile shoppers.
Contactus@zobristinc.com for a V9 Migration discussion or for Mobiecom Demo!
Video: What you need to know about the Websphere Commerce V9 Upgrade
