HCL Commerce Innovative and Engaging buying Experiences Built Cloud Native at Scale
                     HCL Commerce  
Innovative and Engaging 
buying Experiences built 
Cloud Native at Scale 
How companies go to market is rapidly changing in today’s world and your digital strategy is playing an even more important role 
in the success of your business. Market changes happen rapidly, competitors can introduce innovations without warning, requiring a 
modern commerce platform that is adaptable, innovative, agile and enterprise grade, that supports every business model, B2B, B2C 
or B2B2C, so they can succeed in this fast-changing world. 
HCL Commerce is designed to adapt to your business strategy, not the other way around, helping your commerce experiences lead 
the pack instead of having to follow the herd with a templated approach. With HCL Commerce you can support the individuality of 
your brands, as well as pivot to address current and future business needs quickly and elegantly so you can grow with confidence 
and deliver a consistently inspiring experience. 
Key Benefits 
Innovate more in less time Drive market share Save time and cost 
with a modern, cloud ready, by taking advantage of unmatched by reducing dependency on IT with 
extensible architecture omnichannel commerce capability easy-to-use business user tools
Improve customer experience Enhance your capabilities Support for both B2B, and B2C and 
with personalized interactions with a broad ecosystem of HCL and B2B2C 
across all touchpoints third-party commerce services use cases 
Key Dierentiators 
Performance & Security
Performance is not a bolt on… It’s core to the platform… It’s our DNA. We provide a secure and highly scalable solution 
for our customers – some even seeing see 40k+ orders an hour during peak buying times – so they can rest easy.
Resilience
HCL Commerce is architected around resiliency. At any moment in time, unplanned events arise, and ecommerce 
trac can spike. For these scenarios, our customers rely on HCL Commerce to stay up and running. 
Versatile
Any business model on a single code base, single catalog, across multiple geographies or brands. When you need to 
pursue new growth opportunities, HCL Commerce is ready to support you with the speed and agility you need to 
capitalize.
Open and Extensible
Need a platform where the brand can be dierentiated among the competition? With HCL Commerce’s API-first robust 
extensibility framework, you can separate your brand from the pack with the customizations your business needs.
Cloud Native
With a cloud native approach, our customers are able to deploy the way they want, on-premise, public cloud or a 
hybrid model, without sacrificing innovation or speed and lowering their total cost of ownership.
Control
Our customers are empowered to build amazing customer experiences that dierentiate their brand, engage their 
customers and ultimately sell more – and they can do it faster.
Architecture
“Cloud native technologies empower organizations to build and run scalable applications in modern, dynamic environments such as public, private, and hybrid clouds. Containers, service meshes, microservices, immutable infrastructure, and declarative APIs exemplify this approach. 
These techniques enable loosely coupled systems that are resilient, manageable, and observable. Combined with 
robust automation, they allow engineers to make high-impact changes frequently and predictably with minimal toil.
Cloud Native Computing Foundation Charter
HCL Commerce is cloud native based upon the industry standard defined by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation 
and these four pillars: 
•  Continuous Delivery describes a process which when adopted, enables developers to release applications more quickly, 
reliably and frequently, while reducing the risk and increasing the quality. 
•  DevOps describes a process for software developers and IT operations professionals to collaborate better in order automate 
the process of software delivery. 
•  Micro-services is an architectural approach to building an application by delivering it as a collection of small services that run 
independently and communicate via APIs. 
•  Containers provide the ability to manage and migrate the application dependencies along with the application while 
abstracting away the OS and the underlying cloud platform in many cases.1  
Continuous Delivery 
Through the use of separate Docker containers for store, search, transactions and client customizations that fully 
encapsulate application logic, middleware and the operating system layer, clients are themselves empowered to 
deploy applications via continuous innovation/continuous delivery since these images mean less manual work, 
allowing you to install and upgrade faster and deploy customizations in an automated way and giving the client a 
lower cost of ownership for their commerce platform. 
DevOps 
HCL also leverage Docker to make the set-up, deployment and management of commerce environments quick and 
easy so developers and deployment engineers (IT Operations) can configure development, test and production 
environments in a matter of hours with minimal manual processes and intervention. Docker images make cloning 
new instances fast and error free, and consuming HCL provided commerce system enhancements seamless, giving 
businesses the agility needed to seize market opportunities, launch new sites and innovate the customer experience 
faster than ever before. We also provide deep support services with extensive experience helping clients establish a 
cloud native architecture and organization to get the most out of their HCL Commerce (and other Docker-based) 
1 https://medium.com/velotio-perspectives/cloud-native-applications-the-why-the-what-the-how-9b2d31897496
“
Micro-services 
HCL took a slightly dierent approach to microservices by bundling them together based on a clear business 
function they supported – a Business Service. This was done to reduce the maintenance burden while still enabling 
the independence of those key applications. By logically group applications into 4 distinct business services, each 
residing in a container – storefront, search, customizations and transaction – we made it simple for organizations to 
change, add, or update the business service without aecting any of the others business services.  
Containers 
With the introduction of version 9, HCL Commerce simplified platform management, introducing Docker containers. 
Docker makes it easier to create, deploy, and run applications, by allowing eCommerce professionals to package an 
application with all of the parts it needs, from the OS up to the application its libraries and other dependencies, and 
ship it all out as one package. The benefits of Docker are well understood and well documented. 
The following have been taken from ‘Understanding the Business Value of Docker’, Docker Whitepaper, June 2017.
•  “70 - 90x Decrease in Application Maintenance & Support”
•  “65% Reduced Developer Onboarding Time”
•  “25%+ Reduced Compute Resources” by containerizing’ apps and consolidating Virtual Machines (VMs)
•  “30-35% Reduced Storage Footprint” 
•  “5-10% Reduced Memory Requirements”
•  “13x More Application Releases”
•  “10x Increase in Scalability”
Kubernetes 
Kubernetes is a production-ready, open source platform designed with Google's accumulated experience in 
container orchestration including automating deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications, 
combined with best-of-breed ideas from the community. 
With modern web services, users expect applications to be available 24/7, and developers expect to deploy new 
versions of those applications several times a day. Containerization helps package software to serve these goals, 
enabling applications to be released and updated in an easy and fast way without downtime. Kubernetes helps you 
make sure those containerized applications run where and when you want and helps them find the resources and 
tools they need to work.  
Headless / API-First 
HCL Commerce has been an API first platform since 2014, developing extensive APIs and webhooks to ensure our 
customers have the flexibility they need to succeed. 
By exposing all Commerce functions as REST and GraphQL APIs, combined with the capabilities of both Containers 
and business services, B2C and B2B users can more quickly and easily adapt to market changes, incorporating new 
marketing and selling channels as they arise. APIs also make it easy to integrate new innovations from your partners 
so you can deliver better customer experiences - for example by allowing any content experience using any content 
management system.
Further, by combining a strong API strategy with webhooks you can help fill the gaps in an API-first approach so you 
can be sure you’re capturing all the relevant data when you need it so you can make better faster decisions. Some of 
the benefits of webhooks nclude:
•  A more ecient exchange of data, keyed o of events, so you don’t waste API calls.
•  The ability to support inconsistently changing data.
•  Provision of near) real-time information.
There are, of course, situations where having a reliable and trusted storefront that is built on industry best practices 
so you can quickly and easily spin up a new site, whether that be for a new campaign, a new brand or a new 
geography. The React reference storefront provides the speed, reliability and security you need to be able to provide 
a great customer experience fast. 
Key Capabilities 
SPA and PWA Reference Store for B2B and B2C built on React mean brands can reduce the time and cost of implementation 
with stores built on modern technology leveraging industry best practices and years of customer input. 
API-first approach so brands can create and deploy any customer experience strategy. All commerce functions are 
exposed as GraphQL and REST APIs so they can build customer focused experiences. Embedded Content Management 
System (CMS) and Digital Asset Management (DAM) with rich functionality, included without charge enables business users 
to make changes to your store. 
Precision Marketing gives brands complete control to deliver timely and relevant promotions and oers. This is critical to 
maintain an on-going dialog with customers and build stronger relationships. 
Promotions to incent purchase behavior and drive sales. More than 150 promotions delivered out of the box that can be 
configured to target specific customers, segments, online behavior, purchase history and more. You can even create hierar-
chies to prioritize, stack and define how promotions are redeemed. 
Advanced site search and navigation that make it easy for customers to find what they’re looking for quickly and easily. By 
giving business users the ability to control the customer experience with personalized content and site discovery, the customer 
comes away satisfied with their experience and more likely to return. 
Global multi-site capabilities that enable brands to easily build and manage multiple storefronts on a single platform. Strike 
the perfect balance between local control of catalog and merchandising and centralized management. 
Deep business user tooling so all the key stakeholders can get the most out of the platform, whether they’re creating new 
website, promotions, search parameters, personalization and more. 
HCL and third-party integrations built by our extensive ecosystem of global partners, geared to enhance your customer’s 
experience and extend HCL Commerce’s capabilities 
HCL and third-party integrations built by our extensive ecosystem of global partners, geared to enhance your customer’s 
experience and extend HCL Commerce’s capabilities 
Built-in customer service functionality to enable customer service reps (CSR) to support online customers. Call center 
capabilities are embedded in the platform and the CSRs can deliver a better experience as they see what the customer sees 
through a simple web interface, for both B2B and B2C. 
Merchandising that works intuitively, allowing merchandisers to quickly make changes and automate tasks to help them focus 
more on product strategy. They can even create rules at the SKU level, giving them incredible flexibility to promote and sell 
while achieving high margins. 
Personalization that can be adjusted in real-time based on customer behavior and history. Product recommendations, 
promotions, oers and more can be built for a specific customer at a specific time. 
Catalog management that is easy to use helps business users manage catalogs, categories, catalog entries, merchandising 
associations, product attributes, and attachments in the store through a robust inheritance model.  
Frictionless checkout than enables multiple quick checkout profiles, spend-level validation for B2B and multi-order, multi-user 
collaboration for B2B.
Product information management (PIM) to help centralize data and provide consistently accurate and rich product information 
on any channel it is needed - web sites, print catalogs, ERP systems and electronic date feeds among others. It also helps organi-
zations across multiple verticals (for e.g Retail, Distribution, Manufacturing, Financial etc) speed up the time to market and 
accelerates marketing eciency. 
16 languages and 30+ currencies supported out of the box so brands can easily expand their international reach. 
Embedded CMS and DAM to streamline the creation, management and distribution of your content to ensure your customers 
have a consistently great experience in any channel on any device. 
Solution Factory (SoFy) integration to automate deployment of complementary technologies like Google Cloud Platform .
Integration with Google Analytics for a more complete picture of your customers and their activity 
HCL Commerce now certified on Google Cloud Platform, AWS, IBM and Azure 
Key Considerations and Planning 
Before jumping into an implementation of HCL Commerce V9.X there are some basic requirements you should plan on in order 
to get the most out of your deployment as quickly as possible. Architecturally, the below simplified graphic will give you a 
sense of what your set-up should look like to optimize your cloud-native strategy. Every case is dierent so you should engage 
with our Advisory services team and your preferred partner to learn more and build a go-to-market strategy leveraging both 
pools of experience in moving to cloud native. 
In Summary  
HCL Commerce makes agile commerce @ scale a reality for enterprise companies. Leveraging a modern, cloud-ready, 
extensible architecture our clients can deliver more innovation in less time to unlock growth, achieve higher ROI, accelerate 
innovation and reduce their business risk. HCL combines the trusted scale, security and performance you expect, with the 
speed and flexibility of a modern cloud-ready, extensible commerce architecture – all built on 20 years of unmatched, 
omni-channel innovation that’s been co-created with our customers and partners. Start delivering world-class experiences that 
are easy to customize on a platform that enables non-stop innovation. Visit the website to learn more. 
HCL Commerce Tech Talk Series: https://bit.ly/HCLCommerceYouTube 
Knowledge Center: https://help.hcltechsw.com/commerce/index.html 
Resources Docker: https://youtu.be/6gJs0F8V3tM 
Kubernetes: https://kubernetes.io/docs/tutorials/kubernetes-basics/ 
Apache Kafka: https://kafka.apache.org/documentation/ 
Apache ZooKeeper: https://zookeeper.apache.org/ 
Redhat OpenShift: https://youtu.be/5dwMrFxq8sU 
Prometheus: https://prometheus.io/docs/introduction/overview/ 
Grafana: https://grafana.com/docs/grafana/latest/ 
Elasticsearch: https://grafana.com/docs/grafana/latest/ 
Jenkins: https://jenkins.io/doc/ 
Redis: https://redis.io/documentation 
Gluster: https://youtu.be/ml6xRrkum2M 
NGINX: https://youtu.be/UExhlDjJ2_M 
Vault: https://youtu.be/VYfl-DpZ5wM 
Learn More: Talk with your HCL Sales representative or visit us online https://www.hcltechsw.com/commerce
About HCL Software
HCL Software, a division of HCL Technologies (HCL) develops, markets, sells, and supports over 30 product families in the areas of Customer Experience, 
Digital Solutions, DevSecOps, and Security and Automation. HCL Software is the cloud native solution factory for enterprise software and powers millions of 
apps at more than 20,000 organizations, including over half of the Fortune 1000 and Global 2000 companies. HCL Software's mission is to drive ultimate 
customer success with its IT investments through relentless prod.uct innovation. please visit www.hcltechsw.com
Copyright © 2021 HCL Technologies Limited.