Demands of evolving businesses - Part 2

Under this blog I am investigating that what modern technologies we require to meet those business requirements and defiantly I am looking for advice that what you will prefer as a solution architect.

Why Hybris?
Hybris is SAP partner and very well integrated with SAP.
Strong Order management and fulfilment, automatically recommend profitable route.
Comprehensive PIM and E-Commerce
Flexible framework for customizing call centre and in store interfaces.
Marketing Suite is available for customer engagement.
Hybris Cloud for Commerce perfectly fit with scalability concerns.

Why not Hybris?
Week CMS with relevantly limited personalization
Over all very much Expensive, Requires very serious Java developers.

Why Site Core?
Strong CMS capabilities
Strong Digital Marketing Suite
Offers Commerce solution including PIM
Site Core can be setup on Azure.
Highly customizable

Why Not Site Core?
Very much technology driven, Marketers have to adopt their ways.
Longer time to new Features
Strong search but doesn’t provide much out of box.
A bit complex requires training.

Why Magento with Drupal?
Fully customizable
Probably Least expensive
An Open Source, PHP based, Full featured Complete E-Commerce platform
Unlimited themes
Drupal fulfils requirement of a CMS for a commerce platform.
 A lot of modules are available on Magento Connect for personalization and to achieve any other business goals.

Why Not Magento with Drupal?
Merging too many modules means its complex to upgrade.
Dependency on other modules.
Module in itself should be best.

Why EPiServer’s Digital ExperienceCloud
Not only a CMS or a Commerce product but creates a complete digital experience to engage customers.
Digital Experience Hub will help marketing automation, social media, web analytics and enterprise content management
Cloud based hosting and management is available for scaling.
Highly Customizable and Great Search Capabilities
Bugs Fixes and features are available bi-weekly via Nuget.
Impressive set of Personalization and social reach without the need of further customization.
Helps Marketers, the way they want.
Extranet support
Strong security features

Why Not?
Slightly costly
Bit complex requires training.

All those systems can achieve most of the general requirements of a business

Hybris is not a best option for Epi Tour, as license price is not justifiable; it may be suitable for a SAP company. Development and maintenance of Hybris based site is also expensive.

Epi Server and Site Core are very close rivals as they both offers .Net based, licensed products, available on near about same prices and nearly same features that fit well with the business requirements. I am giving preference to EPiServer Digital Experience based on differences in Flexibility for Marketers, outstanding support, hosting, eSync and digital exchange hub.

EPiServer Digital Experience has been named as contender over its rivals in an independent research. It is offering a lot more now on nearly same price then others WCMS. This has been acknowledged by The Forrester Wave™: Web Content Management Systems, Q1 2015 report also.

If for instance we ignore php/.Net and open source/licensed issues then Magento with Drupal is a very serious choice by keeping the price and flexibility in mind. With consideration of above business requirements I will not prefer Magneto as it means, a lot of dependency on third party modules. EPiServer Digital Experience will surly take lead as Business is looking for quick ROI, powerful search, customer engagement, personalization, social reach, user’s security and integration with third party systems, cloud based system to help them in reducing their infrastructure costs based on demand and scalability. EPiServer Digital Experience offers a most complete and integrated digital experience platform in cloud without worrying about upgrade issue as for Magento.

Rest of concerns are UI, a future proof, maintainable, scalable, extendible and reliable application.

For UI concerns, Bootstrap fulfils all of the requirements. Its elegant, spontaneous and a responsive UI designing kit to create consistent and cross browsers interfaces.

To meet rest of the functional requirements we will adapt agile development methodologies in our development, following SOLID principals strictly. It will resolve our architectural requirements as it promote usability, maintainability and extendibility. (StructureMap will be used to resolve our IOC needs).
We will be using Microsoft Visual Studio and Team foundation server for code management.
We will be using Microsoft Static Code analysis with all rule sets enabled, duplicate analysis and Stylecop to improve the quality, readability and maintainability of software.
To improve reliability we will be enforcing unit-testing for logics and functionalities. VS Code coverage will be used to determine that how much code has been tested.

Click here for Part 1