As I continue to ponder the global question of what impact the recent hybris announcement will have on SAP eCommerce projects in general, and WCEM opportunities in particular, the question of partners comes to mind.
If you troll the web, you quickly learn that with the hybris acquisition, SAP will inherit relationships with some pretty serious Digital Design Agencies. In the US these could be companies like Razorfish, Optaros, Gorilla etc. The list is much larger in Europe. That makes sense since marketing organizations typically sponsor B2C ecommerce projects and are obsessed with branding, usability etc.
The striking difference with WCEM is that while it's hard to find a lot of partners, the ones that you find are typically branded as "SAP Consultancies with a WCEM practice". Why is that? And how do the questions of "user experience" get dealt with on WCEM projects...from a design perspective?
Since most of the projects that I'm personally familiar with are B2B projects, I don't find these Digital Design Agencies in the room. Clients simply aren't willing to pay the kind of money required to design user experiences from the ground up. They are more interested in the integration with SAP to make sure that the complicated B2B business rules and processes are enforced.
I would love to hear what people in this forum feel about the role that Digital Design Agencies play on their projects and how best to collaborate with them.
Sam