HFS Highlight: HCL and Google team up to win the e-commerce market

On the 4th of June, 2020, HCL announced a new partnership with Google. An innocuous enough announcement when providers and vendors across the industry are quick to release press packs about their latest alliance. But digging into the detail, it quickly becomes apparent that there’s more to this partnership – which focuses on using Google Cloud as the platform for HCL Commerce – a portfolio focused on solving eCommerce challenges for clients in the space. 

First, Google has been working hard to bring the battle to its hyperscale rivals for several months now. Ramping up its sales and marketing team to lure enterprise spend. As the public cloud market evolves into a domain-specific conversation, Google has struggled to keep pace with the enthusiastic addition of features and solutions from AWS. To solve this challenge, the cloud giant has scoured the software and solution landscape to find partners that can help them carve out a chunk of a key vertical – in this instance, e-commerce. And this is where HCL Software comes in – the product-focused arm of HCL Technologies. For some time the firm has focused on building highly pragmatic solutions to tackle challenges in the industry. Combined, Google and HCL seek to build on synergies between their offerings to corner the eCommerce market. No mean feat, but one which could have legs given the increasing animosity between retail giants – among others – and Amazon. 

The alliance itself seems more collaborative than some of the standard solution and channel partnerships that we’ve seen in this space. Executives from HCL advised subject matter experts from Google were helping build and evolve the eCommerce platform. And sales teams on both sides are gearing up to cross-sell into existing client pools, and open new business through joint marketing and thought leadership activities.  

From a technical perspective, both parties stand to benefit from each other’s existing portfolios. Google brings with it advanced analytics and AI capabilities, for example, as well as the core cloud platform. And clients are also set to benefit from any integrations and developments down the road with other Google solutions – including G-Suite, and the increasing prevalence of voice and picture search as routes to sales online. Google, on the other hand, can lean into HCL’s considerable experience solving enterprise level challenges in retail – across both it’s software and services business. With a tried and tested platform for eCommerce ready to spin up in as little as 16 weeks for some clients. There’s also the tantalising prospect that for some clients in the space if you can win and host their eCommerce business, the rest of the company soon follows. An approach, historically aimed at cloudifying ERP that has seen other hyperscalers grow accounts rapidly.   

Covid-19 is driving the next wave of eCommerce, which could quickly become a winner takes all game 

It goes without saying that shuttering up bricks and mortar retail and hospitality outlets have forcefully pushed all retailers to look at their future survival through an eCommerce lens during the Covid-19 pandemic. And while HCL and Google’s partnership has been in the making long-before the outbreak, the timing of the launch has quickly enabled both firms to onboard a plethora of household names – such as DFS, Tailored Brands, and InterToys. 

But outside of an initial swarm of interest from retail clients pivoting their business models – with some example provided by HCL jumping on the platform just in time to handle huge peaks in workloads – the solution tackles some of the biggest challenges in the market right now.  

First off, retailers are understandably reticent to move onto a public platform where their data is shared, and used by other rivals – two supermarket chains for example, are unlikely to be pleased if valuable data – aggregated or otherwise – is passed between them for shared benefit. HCL is heading this challenge off straight away supported by a firm belief that “your data is your data”. Enabling clients to keep their data safely locked down while also benefiting from other open data sets pulled in from Google to fuel insights and decision-making. 

Second, global retailers are intricate pieces of machinery. And many operate vast and diverse infrastructure estates that make migrating wholesale to a single cloud entity impossible – in instances such as local regulatory compliance issues, or as a result of mergers and acquisitions. To meet this challenge head on, the platform is containerised on GCP, allowing the platform to sit on top of hybrid environments.  

Bottom Line: The next wave of eCommerce has never been more important, the Google and HCL partnership sets them up to corner the market 

The impact of Covid-19 aside, HCL modern retail and eCommerce has been ripe for transformation for over a decade. The pandemic, if anything, laid bare the extent to which many businesses transformation projects focused on customer-facing applications and slick websites, while the nuts and bolts servicing them remained mostly unchanged. The collaboration from HCL and Google offers clients in the space the opportunity to rapidly mature their eCommerce platform, with a view to surviving the impact of Covid-19, and thriving in whatever the new normal for the market looks like at the other side.