Services and Solutions

Commerce Developer Environment Offering (ECOM-BLUESHIFT CDE ©)

We are happy to announce our public offering to the vibrant and growing IBM® Commerce Community. This offering combines the feature rich IBM® Cloud with IBM® WebSphere Commerce and best-of-breed Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment software from industry. This offering intends to “standardize” and “improve efficiency” of the Development phase of IBM® WebSphere Commerce based e-commerce solutions. This offering consolidates the combined rich consulting experience of over 50 years with industry-wide general best practices for application development.

What Problems Are We Addressing and Why?

IBM® WebSphere Commerce based e-commerce solutions typically have a long and continuous Development lifecycle. Did the word “long” development cycle raise an alarm for you? Well, “long” is a relative word!  And many of you can provide reasonable cases for why it is long today and maybe its ok for the lifecycle of development to be long! Of course!  This pattern drags down the momentum and ROI of the IBM® WebSphere Commerce based e-commerce solutions! We view it as problem and that is the specific objective our offering intends to address.

Let us take a scenario. A client decides to use IBM® WebSphere Commerce for their e-commerce solution. In order to use the IBM® WebSphere Commerce solution, they have to start on a journey to establish a working Commerce Development Server, Commerce Development environment, Source control repository, Branching Strategy to support multiple projects, Release strategy, Build and Deployment and so on! So, bottom line is every existing and new client has to go through setup, maintenance and upgrade of commerce developer environments and release management procedures periodically.

Above mentioned activities are NOT optional and are required to be done continuously to improve the development cycle efficiency. And, these activities become mandatory whenever there is a new commerce software version released by IBM. Every client does these activities independent of each other in the IBM® Commerce Community. This means – each client goes through discovery, standardization and continuous improvement of procedures for establishing a development environment independently (ably assisted by employees, IBM® business partners and IBM®). But, do you see any good collaboration?  You see a problem?  We do!

Why we see this as an opportunity for improvement and what is the long term Goal

We intend to break away from the above mentioned pattern, which gives rise to the drag and ROI issues for IBM® WebSphere Commerce based e-commerce solutions. We would like to “standardize” and “improve efficiency” of each and every component of the development lifecycle of IBM® WebSphere Commerce based e-commerce solutions. Development environments and build and release management are fundamental for having a vibrant and operation development practice for IBM® WebSphere Commerce. So, we want to start with these two objectives- namely Standardized Development environments and Standardized build and release management. The mentioned offering shall help establish a foundation for a highly effective and faster development environment of IBM® WebSphere Commerce based e-commerce solution.

The long term goal for us is to share the development patterns across all clients of IBM® WebSphere Commerce Community. This shall reduce the development-effort and improve on ROI of solutions.

Highlights of the Commerce Developer Cloud Offering

Commerce Developer Cloud Offering highlights are illustrated and highlighted below.

The mentioned offering shall provide IBM® WebSphere Commerce Developer Integrated Development Environment in the IBM® Cloud with the following mentioned highlights

  • IBM® Cloud Hosting ( Public and Private Cloud Support)
  • IBM® WebSphere Commerce Developer v7.x (FEP-8), v8.x and v9.x supported.
  • Infrastructure and Software management, provisioning done by a dedicated experience professional team.
  • Best Practices Implemented for collaborative team development of IBM® WebSphere Commerce Code.
  • Supports VPN option for using secured On-Premise end-point services from IBM® Commerce IDE.
  • IBM® DB2 Development Database
    • Choice of Local and Remote Options Available.
  • IBM® WebSphere Commerce Search Server (SOLR Search Engine)
    • Choice Local and Remote Options Available.
  • IBM® HTTP Server integrated with Commerce Development IDE.
  • Integrated Source Control System
    • Choice of GitHub® and Apache SVN® Available.
  • Branching and Code-Merge Strategy to support multiple project initiatives
    • Managed Services provided.
  • Continuous Code Quality
    • SonarQube Integration
  • Continuous Integration for Build
    • Jenkins CI and TeamCity integration Available.
  • IBM® Urban Code Deploy for Code/Application Deployment Services
    • Manage the schedule for deployment and historical view.
  • Storefront Automated Test Engine
    • Operational Automated Test Engine
  • Rest API Test Harness
    • Operational Rest Test Harness based on commerce auto-generated service layer (CASL) framework

 

How to use our Offering?
The beta version of our offering will be available to the public in the early part of Q2 2018 (Late April/May 2018). Please contact us to receive a free trial beta version.


“Regardless of what version of WebSphere Commerce you are starting with, SimaCLOUD Solutions for Cloud Hosting IBM’s WebSphere Commerce has the roadmap to accelerate transformation of your WebSphere Commerce application to cloud hosting,” states Jim Pollitt, President of Sima Solutions LLC. He continues: “The new Sima Managed Services and Solutions for Cloud Hosting IBM’s WebSphere Commerce provides Flexible Platforms with Support for Enterprise Developers to simplify management of WebSphere Commerce and accelerate app development.