New Hybris-based HANA Marketplace (“Beta”) emerges

I was recently looking at some of the new of the offers on the HANA Marketplace when I noticed a small link in the upper right hand corner announcing a new marketplace.

After clicking on the link, I started exploring the new site. It looks good and has some improved features such as being able to search the entire marketplace.

As a techie, however, I wanted to find out more about the technical foundation of the marketplace and looked at the html source of the page.

What was interesting was that I found references to Hybris in the code. 

Hybris was just acquired by SAP and here it was already being used in a marketplace. Impressive. This was the first example I’d seen of SAP really using its newly acquired e-commerce framework in a productive setting.

Despite this promising first step, there is still more work to done in this area:

Examples:

• One single marketplace. The ability to buy and sell HANA Cloud Platform extensions (for example, for SuccessFactors) has just been released. I’d like to see these extensions here as well – though an in-app marketplace is probably more relevant
• A mobile application for these marketplaces. Hybris has excellent mobile e-commerce solutions, what about reusing those?

Update: A recent video with Aiaz Kazai provides additional material about the new marketplace.