To help enterprise-sized companies adopt and implement digital innovation, commercetools GmbH, a provider of headless and digital commerce technology, has teamed up with Publicis Sapient, a digital business transformation consultancy. The partnership is expected to increase adoption of commercetools’ application programming interfaces to help large businesses implement a modern, digital architecture that increases scalability and agility through composable commerce, according to commercetools and Publicis.
Composable commerce is a development approach centered around selecting best-of-breed commerce components and composing, or combining, them into a custom application built for specific business needs.
“Publicis Sapient is renowned for setting bold, achievable visions for digital transformation, and helping clients keep up with the evolving technological, societal, and cultural expectations of their clients,” Kelly Goetsch, chief strategy officer for Munich-based commercetools says in a prepared statement. “Together, we’ll empower enterprises at the intersection of adapting to the now and being agile enough to seamlessly handle what’s next.”
Prior to the partnership, commercetools worked with Cambridge, Mass.-based Publicis to bring its technology to Publicis clients. One Publicis client, Bang & Olufsen, a Danish manufacturer of audio and home entertainment products, such as televisions and telephones that sells direct to consumers, used ecommercetools’ technology to integrate all its sales channels into a single omnichannel strategy. For example, Bang & Olufsen’s POS systems are connected to its ecommerce platform to exchange data and to make the online front-end of the platform available in stores. In addition, inventory, pricing, and promotions are updated in real-time across all sales channels and consumers can purchase Bang & Olufsen branded products online and pick them up in-store. The implementation, which is 100% headless, increased conversion rates by more than 60%.
“Now that we have a modern headless platform, this is where the real fun starts, where we can enable omnichannel features and functionalities,” Tomas Antivorskov Krag, director of ecommerce for Bang & Olufsen, says in a prepared statement.
The partnership between ecommercetools and Publicis is also being driven by synergies between the two companies, which are both champions of the microservices-based, API-first, cloud-native and headless movement (MACH) and members of the MACH Alliance. The MACH Alliance is a non-profit industry body that advocates for open and best-of-breed enterprise technology ecosystems by providing resources, education and guidance through industry experts to help businesses make the transition from legacy infrastructure and to a composable, digital infrastructure.
“Commercetools and Publicis Sapient share the same philosophy. We help our clients look at how they can move to a more modern architecture and how they can move to a service-based solution,” Jon Panella, group vice president – Global Commerce Practice for Publicis Sapient, says in a prepared statement.
