Retail and eCommerce highlights this week include: Digital River’s payments, fraud, tax and compliance management solution is now available on SAP App Center. Elastic Path have added the addition of Elastic Path to AWS Marketplace. Collaboration between providers of cloud infrastructure and digital commerce software makes Composable Commerce accessible for more brands.
Investcorp will back Unilog to fuel further platform innovation and customer acquisition. An iconic winter sports brand enhances wholesale purchasing interface with retailers. The Abu Dhabi Department of Culture and Tourism drives data-driven digital transformation with Informatica.
Digital River’s payment, fraud and tax management available on SAP App Center
Digital River has announced that its Payments, Fraud, Tax & Compliance Management solution is now available on SAP App Center. The SAP App Center is the digital marketplace for SAP partner offerings. Digital River’s solution integrates with SAP Commerce Cloud, offering B2C and B2B brands the ability to grow globally at scale. With this solution, brands will be able to enhance their customers’ checkout experience. This includes global payments integrations, the provision of merchant record services and local regulatory compliance taxes, fraud mitigation and more. Brands can scale-up, while Digital River handles back-end functions that can be costly for merchants to implement on their own.
Elastic Path Now Available in AWS Marketplace
Elastic Path have confirmed the addition of Elastic Path to AWS Marketplace. This enhancement can help branded manufacturers to de-risk and accelerate their digital commerce initiatives by bringing the first Composable Commerce solution to Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Brands across industries are facing increasing pressure to differentiate against the competition with inspiring digital commerce experiences. Composable Commerce is designed to give brands the ability to rapidly build, deploy, and optimise unique digital commerce experiences. But it can be challenging for brands to realise the benefits of Composable Commerce as they need to contract with, implement, and support multiple applications from different vendors, leading to complexity and risk.
The availability of the Composable Commerce-as-a-Service offering from Elastic Path makes it easier for brands to embrace Composable Commerce. Composable Commerce-as-a-Service combines a MACH-based commerce platform (microservices, APIs, cloud, and headless) with the Composable Commerce Hub. (An open exchange of business solutions powered by an ecosystem of digital commerce providers). The platform empowers manufacturers with the control and confidence to rapidly launch revenue-generating commerce experiences tailored to their unique requirements. As a result, it reduces the complexity of contracting, implementing, and supporting multiple solutions. This often impedes a brand’s ability to unlock the benefits of Composable Commerce.
The launch of Elastic Path in AWS Marketplace provides all the necessary elements for organizations to quickly, easily, and confidently compose a unique digital commerce solution on AWS.
Key features
- Remove friction from the purchasing process by allowing organizations to initiate Elastic Path acquisition with a click of a button.
- Streamline solution administration by providing a single point of contact for billing and support.
- Provide an ecosystem of applications that manufacturers can pick and choose from to compose experiences according to their business needs.
- Reduce the risk of moving to the cloud by leveraging the combined expertise of Elastic Path and AWS. This will support the build of differentiated digital experiences with confidence.
- Lower infrastructure costs by bringing more applications into the cloud to achieve economies of scale and unlimited scalability.
Investcorp acquires Unilog to support growth
Investcorp, a leading global provider and manager of alternative investment products has acquired a majority stake in Unilog. The company intends to leverage the capital backing to accelerate product innovation, enhance customer service, and expand market presence through both organic and inorganic acquisition opportunities.
According to research from Digital Commerce 360, last year about 16.9% – or $957 billion – of all distributor sales of nearly $6 trillion was done via digital commerce. This growth is expected to persist as B2B buyers continue to adopt eCommerce as their preferred channel of purchase.
Current Unilog customers include Distribution International, Cameron Ashley Building Products, Arbill Safety, Turtle & Hughes, Orgill. In addition to hundreds of other wholesale distributors, manufacturers, and specialty hardgoods retailers. The company has grown in recurring revenue with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) exceeding 40% over past three years. Unilog believes the infusion of capital from Investcorp will help propel them over the $100 million annual recurring revenue mark.
K2 Sports Upgrades B2B eCommerce With Emerald’s Elastic Suite Platform
Emerald Holding has announced that legendary ski, snowboard and winter outdoor equipment manufacturer, K2 Sports, has deployed Emerald’s Elastic Suite, a next-generation B2B ecommerce and digital merchandising solution. The rollout of Elastic Suite signifies of an upgrade to K2 Sports’ wholesale eCommerce capabilities. Retailers can now virtually access K2’s multiple product lines via the latest digital merchandising technology. This results in a more strategic, streamlined and sustainable wholesale purchasing process.
By deploying Elastic Suite, all of K2 Sports’ product categories and lines of skis, snowboards, helmets and apparel are now featured on a single platform. The platform features an intuitive virtual interface that allows wholesale buyers to strategically browse, sort, customize and complete orders. Custom digital catalogues also contribute to a more cost effective and environmentally friendly B2B sales process.
The rollout gives both K2’s B2B sales team and its large network of sports retailers full access to Elastic Suite’s complete offering of digital merchandising and virtual sales tools. The new technology platform supports all K2 branded alpine products. Regions covered by the deployment include K2 Sports markets in all of North America, the United States and Canada.
Abu Dhabi selects Informatica to support cloud strategy
The Abu Dhabi Department of Culture and Tourism (DCT Abu Dhabi) has selected Informatica to modernise its cloud strategy. The department has ambitions for the country to remain a key destination and relevant during the global pandemic. DCT Abu Dhabi has become a trusted data provider to both government and private organisations. Ultimately, this should support the objective to increase visits to the UAE capital post-pandemic.
Abu Dhabi saw a record number of international visitors in 2019. The country aims to make the city a “must-see, must-visit” leisure and business destination for international and domestic guests. DCT Abu Dhabi contributes to the nation’s economic diversification. The agency works closely with stakeholders and partners to market Abu Dhabi both locally and internationally. It also helps preserve Abu Dhabi’s cultural heritage. The agency supports tourist attractions and hotels about ways they can enhance guest experiences, cultivate references, and attract more visitors.
Utilsing automation
To introduce automation into its data ecosystem, DCT Abu Dhabi deployed an integrated Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services platform. This included Cloud Data and Application Integration, Data Quality, B2B Data Exchange, and API Management. In four months, it built 90 complex ETL jobs spanning 17 source systems. It implemented over 100 data quality rules enforced before the data is deposited into a Microsoft SQL Server-based data warehouse. The data warehouse started to use Informatica Cloud B2B Gateway to capture data coming in from hotels, cultural sites, and tourism partners in emails and files.
It leverages Cloud Data and Application Integration to consume data from Wi-Fi hotspots and industry aggregators. Instead of reporting tourism data monthly, it’s been able to switch to daily reporting for important KPIs. These include occupancy rate, room revenue, etc. for performance of the hotel industry. DCT Abu Dhabi employees are also saving significant time that they previously spent manually collecting and integrating data.
As it continues the journey, DCT Abu Dhabi plans to move its data warehouse to Microsoft Azure for greater agility. It will leverage the prebuilt connectivity from Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services to help accelerate modernisation to Azure. Informatica and Microsoft Azure Partnership provides synergy and integration between the two platforms. DCT Abu Dhabi was recently recognised by Gartner as a finalist in the 2020 Gartner Government Eye on Innovation Award. The award recognised its work in improving data quality and delivering new data insights for the culture and tourism sectors.
