[img_assist|nid=9357|title=Hybris CEO, Ariel Lüdi |desc=|link=popup|align=left|width=113|height=150]I met recently with Ariel Lüdi, CEO of Hybris. I must admit, I had never heard of the firm when I was first approached, but they are a big outfit, who for the past 13 years, have been supplying multichannel commerce software that powers big, transactional websites.
Headquartered in Munich, the firm has offices in the UK, the US, Netherlands, Switzerland, Austria and Sweden, plus a dedicated network of business and technology partners across Europe and the US. It has over 200 customers worldwide running more than 1,500 websites. These are mainly global retail and manufacturing brands, including Toys R Us, Adidas, Lufthansa and Waterstones.
The company has grown at the rate of 60 per cent over the last four years, 100 per cent this year, and has been in profit for the last 16 quarters. Its software enables companies to manage sales and marketing operations across multiple channels more easily. From one dashboard, a user can publish content to a website, or produce a printed catalogue for mailing or distribution in a physical store.
“We call it cross-channel content consolidation,” Lüdi told me. “All the stuff you want to sell sits in one repository, together with all the multimedia content and asset for it. If there’s a change to an item, you can make it once and apply it to all channels automatically.”
Earlier this year, the company introduced a mobile module to its Multichannel Suite software, and this has been enhanced in the latest release, V4.2. This enables a user to publish content to a mobile site in addition to the full website, with the content optimized for display on each device accessing the mobile version of the site. It also makes it easy for the user to generate a QR code to drive traffic to the site, and also offers ‘Find My Nearest’ functionality. 
In addition to finding their nearest store, the integration with the retailer’s back office system means that a consumer could also check on stock availability for anything they were interested in. The integration with the brand’s call centre, meanwhile, means that if someone was trying to buy off the mobile site and having difficulties, a message could be generated and sent to the phone to help them complete the transaction. In fact, as Lüdi demonstrated the solution to me, it struck me that it could do just about everything a brand would need to do on mobile. It also includes a detailed reporting module.
It’s obvious that a lot of retailers are starting to look very closely at mobile now. The Hybris solution is not the only one out there, but on the basis of what I saw, it’s one that warrants further investigation. I would imagine that for most of the firms’ existing clients, it’s close to being a no-brainer.
David Murphy
Editor
