All of us at Orckestra are excited to start the new year by announcing the official release of version 4 of Orckestra Commerce Cloud.
In today’s world you need to move fast to keep up with evolving shopper expectations. Traditional ecommerce platforms lack the flexibility to adapt to changing needs and you’re typically faced with major re-platforming to realize the value you’re looking for. We take a different approach. Our Commerce OrchestrationTM Platform adds a new omnichannel foundation to your tech ecosystem, enabling you to transform your business in steps, without always engaging in risky “rip and replace” platform projects. This provides our customers with the freedom to innovate and to build commerce their way, based on their vision. This latest release stays true to that focus by providing:
- Unified product management and merchandising that helps retailers solve problems with fragmented product information and distribution. Our focus is to easily bring product content from different sources to one place, enrich that content to create the right product experience, and distribute it at scale to all your digital channels.
- New omnichannel fulfillment capabilities to better support retailers that want to leverage their stores to fulfill online orders, while ensuring maximum efficiency and lowest fulfillment costs. We’re helping retailers do this faster, without needing to re-platform their existing systems.
- Enhancements to our APIs and developer experience making our customers’ and partners’ development teams more productive.
- Modern cloud architecture that ensures we continue providing the agility and scale required globally by the leading retailers and brands we work with.
Following are some of these new capabilities in a little more detail. We’re looking forward to sharing more with our customers and partners in the new year.
What’s New
New Unified Product Management Application and API
Our new Unified Product Management solution manages the entire product life cycle and combines information on products, rich content, pricing, and inventory for more engaging product experiences. Rich APIs and merchandising capabilities enable our customers to distribute consistent product content to their online storefronts, mobile apps, in-store Kiosks, partner websites, or any other digital channels. Some of the key feature enhancements in V4 include:
- A redesigned Product Management app UI based on modern UX standards
- Simplified product publishing workflows
- Powerful product release scheduling to better manage your campaigns
- Enhanced import/export capabilities for improved performance for Excel and JSON files
- New data architecture that is even more scalable, leveraging Azure Cosmos DB as the product data source. For complex scenarios with many brands, geographies, and hundreds of thousands of products per region, we have the solution!
As always, we started with the API first, so your development team has full access to all our product management functionality.
Digital Asset Management for Products
A powerful yet simple new digital asset management solution built for merchandising products. This is integrated into our Unified Product Management application, and product assets can be managed in the app UI or directly through the API depending on your needs.
Updated Order Fulfillment Capabilities and In-Store Fulfillment App
We added new workflow and order routing options to ensure fulfillment success rates are high and costs remain low. The updated app also improves the store associate experience with integrated shipping carrier management and shipping document workflows. Overall, retailers can now launch their new order management and fulfillment programs faster and execute them more effectively in store.
Move to New ‘Serverless’ Cloud Architecture on Azure
In this release we’ve moved many of our applications and services to ‘Serverless’ components on Azure. This helps us simplify deployment and have more dynamic scalability, giving us more time to focus on building our platform, since we’ll spend less time managing infrastructure. Making it even easier to scale infrastructure up/down is key for our retail customers that can have significant spikes in demand (sometimes unexpected) and helps us better deal with “spiky” workloads like scheduled data imports. We’re also decoupling platform components into smaller more focused services using Azure Functions and Azure Web Apps, which further enhances our ability to scale platform components more autonomously based on specific areas of demand.
Reference Storefront and Digital Commerce Experience Management (DCXM) Improvements
Developers working with our DCXM and Reference Storefront (aka RefApp) to build ecommerce solutions will be happy with some of the new capabilities we’ve added:
- Multi-site configuration so you can more easily manage many eCommerce site configurations from one website instance. This makes it easier to manage different regions and sales channels having different client bases without having to maintain completely separate web sites.
- Improved search facet configuration accessible directly through our Digital Commerce Experience Management (DCXM) UI.
- New components for managing recurring orders, enabling front-end developers to more easily integrate “subscription-based” purchase scenarios into their solutions.
- New Content search component makes it easier to blend products and content within the search results in the online storefront.
- Various SEO improvements.
Learn more about these new capabilities and many more by reaching out to one of our experts. If you happen to be in New York for NRF 2020, please drop by and see us at booth 802.
