ATG Oracle Commerce – Planning for the Future – Next Steps – Part 4

7 Comments

1. Hello Devon,

   In terms of “Keeps you within the Oracle family, however I’m still not sold on the feature set”, what features do you think are missing. With Oracle’s significant investment you would think there would be at least feature parity with ATG and further integrations with their CX suite?

   This has been an interesting set of articles with your own particular insights into the ATG Commerce.

   Thanks

   Reply

   • Jerry,

     Well, fundamentally a multi-tenant SaaS solution cannot be as customizable as a well designed on-prem system. Most of the retailer I’ve worked with using ATG Oracle Commerce, selected the platform in large part due to how extensive and customizable it is. Oracle Commerce Cloud’s solution is MUCH more limited than ATG on-prem in how you can extend it and integrate it with your own systems.

     To be honest I’m not sure how much headway has been made in the last few years, as it’s been a while since I really examined the Oracle Commerce Cloud offering, so many of the issues I saw back in 2016 might all be fixed by now, I don’t know. However at the time there were major feature gaps not only with ATG Oracle Commerce but also with competitors like Magento and Shopify. I wrote about the issues I saw back then here: https://www.digitalsanctuary.com/java/atg/oracle-commerce-cloud-good-bad-ugly.html

     Hopefully things have gotten better, but I haven’t heard from anyone from Oracle Commerce Cloud, or any of their clients. I’d be happy to take another look and see how much progress has been made.

     it’s tricky because I can imagine that I sound like I am anti-Oracle, or anti-Oracle Commerce, or anti Cloud. I am none of those things. I AM disappointed in what I’ve seen from how Oracle has treated the ATG Oracle Commerce product since their purchase of ATG. I AM disappointed in the circa-2016 state of the Oracle Commerce Cloud offering and the sales and marketing activities around it. I would LOVE for ATG to have grown into an amazing competitive updated on-prem product and to have spun off a great SaaS solution for companies who’s needs are more aligned with a SaaS solution, etc…

     Devon

     Reply

2. Hello Devon,

   Great series of articles !
   Why OCC is not a good choice if your current platform is in Oracle Commerce(ATG) ? You mentioned you are not very much impressed by features of OCC, Does “feature” signifies here the business functionalities ? If yes, then that you can do using all the extensibility capabilities of the platform. If no, what are the aspect you don’t like about OCC.

   Is there any use case which is not possible in OCC using extensibility feature.

   By the way, i have went through your article : https://www.digitalsanctuary.com/java/atg/oracle-commerce-cloud-good-bad-ugly.html

   Thanks

   Reply

   • Sarbajeet,

     Thanks for the comment. Again, my info is probably a bit out of date, but last time I saw it there was no way to do things like BOGO promotions, or brand based coupons. Gift Cards weren’t supported. The catalog management UI seemed to be very ill suited for large catalogs. No hierarchy or inherency model for custom product types/attributes. If these gaps are still present, those represent deal breakers for most of the ATG Oracle Commerce retailers I’ve worked with.

     OCC customization used to be purely client side javascript, which has a host of security and performance issues. I think they rolled out server side support, which solves some of that. But I think it’s still sandboxed JS with a limited set of hooks and events?

     It sounds like you’ve been working with OCC more recently so I’d be happy to hear what your thoughts are or how the customization and extensibility works versus the old ATG environment. Is true auto-scaling finally available?

     But there’s plenty of real world projects I’ve worked on for ATG Oracle Commerce retailers that I think would be impossible or MUCH harder to implement on OCC. Adding completely new payment types, which are available under certain order conditions, and handling split payments via payment groups, and making it all work nicely for checkout, fulfillment, return, and CSC flows – for example.

     SaaS solutions are by nature less conducive to serious customization than on-prem options. A shared environment means strict security and resource management requirements that limit you to sandboxes, a preset list of events/hooks, etc… Customizations via CSS and JS (even server side JS) doesn’t provide the same breadth or depth of customization options. Not to mention the security and performance issues compared to a stateful JVM based solution.

     Reply

3. Interested in your thoughts for a b2b implementation option that may have quite a bit of customization. You mention Shopify, BigCommerce and CommerceTools but those are very retail / eComm specific

   Reply

   • Well Shopify and BigCommerce are definitely B2C focused and limited in customization. Commerce Tools has at least some focus on B2B https://commercetools.com/b2b and may be worth looking at.

     I asked a friend who has his finger on the pulse of the eCommerce world and his response was:

     “Not enough information to answer the question. But assuming an upmarket B2B company that wants to build a highly customized platform, I’d be looking at:
     SAP Commerce (hybris) – If you have other SAP tools, or really need to be able to scale
     Adobe (Magento 2) – If you want low TCO and long term viability and don’t have SF or SAP tools you depend on
     Salesforce Commerce Cloud (CloudCraze) – If your business depends on Salesforce CRM”

     So maybe that helps?

     Reply

4. Devon,

   Having successfully led a project to move off of ATG/Endeca 11 (after helping clean up a brutal 10 to 11 upgrade just a short time before), your series is like reading the notes of our discussions. The capabilities of ATG were or are tremendous, but not only did they not invest in the platform to make it more contemporary, they also missed the boat of making the platform less technologically complex to run/maintain. You can do almost anything with it, but it often felt like you’d need an army of developers to get it done.

   I found success in moving to Episerver (now rebranded as Optimizely), and used their core commerce tool to provide both B2B and B2C experiences linked to a SAP back end. I would imagine that in the remaining base of ATG users, there are a range of folks. Some whom have customized the tool to a high degree, or have a large staff to support it, that moving is not palatable, and a cloud move is an option. However, there are also a lot of smaller and midsized organizations who under-utilize the capabilities, and likely could move to something more contemporary and gain actual use of features, while never missing the power they never used. Moving to the cloud for either group seems to be delaying the inevitable, unless Oracle would decide to open-source the ATG platform.

   Reply

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