SAP continues to fine-tune its Commerce Cloud and will release monthly security updates and bug fixes from now on. In line with its guiding principle of continuous innovation, it has announced the planned release of new features and functionalities every three months to catapult its customers’ e-commerce business to new heights. With this change in development, complex and time-consuming upgrades of SAP Commerce Cloud are now a thing of the past. This brings a positive side-effect: The integrated Composable Storefront will profit from the update strategy and receive a functionality boost on the same timeline.
For SAP customers, SAP Commerce Cloud version 2211 is not just a powerful major release. It also includes the new Composable Storefront frontend integrated into Commerce Cloud. To ensure that the entire e-commerce solution remains up to date, SAP has adapted the entire update strategy. SAP Commerce Cloud will become like an operating system in the sense that it receives regular updates to avoid any “big bangs”.
SAP Commerce Cloud – Continuous Innovation in a Nutshell
SAP will release security updates and bug fixes on a monthly basis.
It promises new functionality at the end of every quarter – so every three months.
A new major release of
will only be released when there are major updates of the leading core frameworks Java and Spring. This will probably be the case in 2024 since the support for Spring Framework 5.3 is set to expire at the end of 2024.
SAP deems a release as ‘current’ for at least six months. After that, it retains the right to no longer support the update in question. This may sound like a very strict update policy, but it comes with a key advantage for companies: they will always run the latest software version, including the latest feature and security updates.
Compared to the prior strategy, where new features were only released once a year, SAP Commerce Cloud will now gain new functionality four times a year. This approach makes it possible to move away from the time-consuming and complex upgrades of the past and to continually provide new functions.
This way, customers will profit from new functionality sooner and faster, but will also have to react more quickly when updates come out.
Feature Rollout Phase
SAP Commerce has changed its update strategy with regard to the feature rollout phase in particular. As part of the changes, new features are not simply introduced every quarter; instead, they are automatically included in the new version but deactivated initially. This allows companies to test-drive and adapt the new functionality.
The features are deactivated for the first six months but can be activated and adapted. After this time, the new features are activated by default.
However, you can still leave them deactivated for another six months. This gives you a total of 12 months to introduce and adapt new features.
After that time, features are available as standard capabilities out-of-the-box.
Test Phase Preview Releases
For developers, the preview release is something to look forward to. In addition to the quarterly feature schedule, SAP also provides a preview version before every feature release.
The preview release allows you to test certain new capabilities ahead of time.
Note: The preview release cannot be used in production environments.
SAP Composable Storefront
In terms of updates, SAP aims for a close link between frontend and backend, creating a form of operating system. As noted above, SAP intends to make available an updated SAP Composable Storefront version – which is compatible with the SAP Commerce Cloud version – every three months.
The release schedule is the same as for SAP Commerce Cloud.
Advantage: Backend and frontend can be updated at the same time.
New frontend releases are compatible and have been tested with the SAP Commerce Cloud updates from the past six months.
For Composable Storefront, SAP also retains the right to no longer list older versions as current and exclude them from the development process.
SAP Commerce Cloud Updates – Summary
Customers can look forward to faster and more efficient updates of their e-commerce platform. Monthly security updates and bug fixes make the platform safer and more stable. By adding new features every three months, SAP also improves user-friendliness and the customer experience. Customers and providers of commerce solutions finally get to move on from ‘big bang’ updates to manageable updates – saving not only time but also making scheduling much easier and bringing down costs.