Modern Commerce:

Its Evolution from the Monolith to Microservices

www.sayonetech.com
The field of commerce is witnessing a great deal of technological
changes, and the impact of these developments is far-reaching
as far as organizations are concerned. Right from the "dot-com"
boom era, the all-in-one enterprise commerce solutions
developed by technology companies like Oracle, ATG, hybris, IBM,
and SAP have dominated the market. There was little or no
competition and these five companies enjoyed an absolute
monopoly on a year-over-year basis, as confirmed by analysts
like Forrester and Gartner in their annual surveys.

After enjoying a good run for more than a decade, these

solutions became increasingly irrelevant as modern-day
commerce needed dynamic and diverse solutions that were
more focused on creating impactful customer experiences to
keep up with the developments in the market. During this time,
Oracle acquired ATG and also discontinued its product line. IBM
sold its commerce business to HCL. Hybris, which was acquired
by SAP, continued to struggle to cater to the needs of a changing
market.

Many factors contributed to bringing about changes in the

02 www.sayonetech.com
market. Most notable among them were the acceptance of the
cloud and the benefits it offers, the increase in the complexity of
commerce processes, and the emergence of touchpoints and
new channels that went beyond mobile devices and traditional
computing. Furthermore, over the past couple of years, the
developments in the field have revolutionized the way commerce
is carried out as the solutions available were incapable of
handling the new challenges because of the legacy tech stacks
they used and their monolithic architecture.

Third Generation Commerce

Platforms
The challenges posed by the market led to the development of
modern MACH principles-based solutions. These solutions are
experiencing phenomenal growth as they are widely accepted
by enterprise customers. Besides, technological advancements
such as cloud computing, loose coupling, API-centricity,
headless, SPA frontends, and facilitated integration – concepts
that are alien to monolithic commerce systems – came into
existence.

It is, therefore, not surprising at all that the commerce market is

fast adopting modular architecture and distributed SaaS
systems. The technological consulting and research firm Gartner
describes this as "Composable Commerce," while others refer to

03 www.sayonetech.com
The aim of creating this whitepaper is to help you understand the
new paradigm and the nature of the change so that you can
plan your transformation strategy. While the first section deals
with understanding composable commerce or microservices, the
second section describes the process of migrating to the new
model.

04 www.sayonetech.com
Table of Contents

Monolith

1 Commerce Monolith and Its Nature

2 Commerce Monoliths and the Challenge

3 Future of Commerce Solutions

Microservices

1 Introduction

2 Advantages

3 Monolith to Microservices

4 Migration to Microservices

05 www.sayonetech.com
 Section 1
Monolith

06
Commerce Monolith and Its Nature
Any enterprise that is using a monolithic commerce solution will
realize the need to change the approach and modernize the
solution and the infrastructure. This is because ensuring and
delivering the best customer experience via monolithic
commerce suites is a challenging task.

Many enterprises started off with the monolithic commerce

solutions that were available at the beginning of the Web 2.0 era.
As organizations grew and processes became more complex,
monolithic software applications posed impediments to scaling
up operations. Today, most companies are at crossroads and
are forced to change, adapt, and modernize their commerce
platforms in the wake of unprecedented technological
advancements.

Monolithic Software Applications

A monolithic commerce suite is a software application package
that offers commerce-related functionality. Top providers of

07 www.sayonetech.com
monolithic software solutions are Oracle, IBM/HCL, SAP, and
Intershop. Cloud-based commerce products provided by Oracle
and SAP are almost similar to their legacy products as they
display many underlying characteristics.

During the past several decades, monolithic software

applications have been widely used by enterprises. These
applications had a wider reach within organizations. They
constitute central elements that support or directly implement
crucial business processes. They also had multi-language and
multi-country capabilities and supported B2B and B2C
commerce. These applications were also integrated with other
modules, including:

Enterprise Resource Planning

Customer Relationship Management
Warehouse Management
Product Lifecycle Management
Content Management

Monolithic Software Solutions –

Characteristics
Traditionally, application software vendors delivered one product
that provided all the commerce functionality for organizations.
This approach led to the development of monolithic

08 www.sayonetech.com
architectures, which were characterized by low modularity and
strong internal dependencies.

Storefront

Catalog

Content Price

Standard Search
Custom
Module
Custom
Functionality Cart Promotion Functionality
Order Profile

Infrastructure and
Framework Layer

Proprietary Framework
Standard software products offer customers a reasonable
amount of flexibility to create value for themselves. Developers
could also customize the products built using robust toolkits and
programming languages. However, the flexibility comes at the
cost of being limited to a specific programming model. Besides,
proprietary software solutions come with strong vendor lock-in.

09 www.sayonetech.com
Difficulty in Integration
Content management, commerce, CRMs, and PIMs have a
significant role to play within organizations. However, they need
to be linked with other systems. The performance of the
application software was significantly impacted whenever
third-party packages were integrated with it. This is because of
the difficulty of integrating third-party packages that are
technologically outdated and mainly based on files, XML,
proprietary solutions, and basic REST APIs. That’s why it is difficult
for monoliths to cater to the needs of modern-day businesses.
However, the third-party packages will be useful when migrating
to a state-of-the-art platform that will help businesses meet not
only today’s but also tomorrow’s demands.

Legacy Tech Stacks

Technological developments have been happening at a rapid
pace in the field of information technology for many years now.
But the market for monoliths has been slowing down recently.
Groundbreaking developments like cloud computing, API-
centricity, serverless, headless, and microservices are
revolutionizing the software development industry by improving
the efficiency of resource allocation, reducing time to market,
and increasing agility. However, legacy software solutions have
not been successful in capitalizing on the developments. A
modern commerce platform, on the other hand, has been

10 www.sayonetech.com
successful in leveraging the power of technology to easily and
effectively help businesses that are willing to do away with
outdated legacy systems and migrate to modern-day
commerce platforms.

Commerce Monoliths and the

Challenge
As mentioned before, monoliths are not equipped to handle
either present-day or future business challenges. Furthermore, it
is difficult to assure quality in the case of monolithic architecture,
and often the automated tests are very basic in nature. Besides,
the delivery efficiency of complex legacy systems is low. This
makes it expensive to incorporate changes.

Legacy Tech Stacks Vendor Lock-in

Low Quality Costly Maintenance

Technical Debt

Infrastructural Low Delivery Efficiency

Footprint

Inefficient Large Broad Scope Mediocre

Teams Solutions

11 www.sayonetech.com
Legacy software systems offer minimal business value as a lot of
effort goes into fixing bugs and creating makeshift solutions
because of the outdated infrastructure, difficulty in getting
vendor support, and, in general, the inadequacy of old solutions
in meeting the demands of today’s businesses. This, in turn,
impacts their performance and scalability. Furthermore,
resources are spent on merely maintaining the platform rather
than taking it forward. Moreover, inefficient scaling increases
operational costs and reduces flexibility.

Customer Experience
More importantly, monolith systems lack the ability to support
businesses by addressing and fulfilling the legitimate needs of
customers. This is because it is difficult to separate the user
interface and the backend processes because of internal
hardwiring and the absence of API-centricity. The introduction of
progressive web apps (PWAs) further highlighted the problems.
PWAs have the ability to revolutionize the customer experience
by enhancing the availability of mobile apps through web
browsers. Mobile users are not required to install any app or
worry as to which operating system they are using.

The separation of the front-end and back-end processes

through APIs is essential to building PWAs. Though legacy
software vendors came up with APIs and JS frontends after a

12 www.sayonetech.com
long time, technically they failed to deliver the outcomes that
businesses were looking for.

Future of Commerce Solutions

Though legacy software vendors have aligned their product
offerings with the needs of modern-day businesses, they don’t
really provide any value. This is because:

Hosting monolithic software on the cloud fails to make it

cloud-native. Customers will not be able to benefit from
the top performance, flexible scaling, or efficient resource
allocation.

Uncovering adapter APIs and being API-driven does not

mean the same thing. A monolith solution’s internal
processes, as well as data-level dependencies, remain
unchanged. This cripples the APIs, and realizing modern
standards such as GraphQL becomes difficult.

Removing the storefront does not make a monolith

become a headless platform. The underlying architecture
and legacy philosophy will hamper the integration of
modern PWA frontends and backends.

As such, the best commerce solutions are those that are based
on cloud computing and MACH (Microservices, API-centric,
Headless) principles. Some legacy software vendors, like SAP,

13 www.sayonetech.com
may continue to do well because of their market position and
wider product offerings. However, it is very clear that they need to
introduce new cloud-native products in order to retain their
position in the market, as retrofitting a monolith is not an option.

14 www.sayonetech.com
 Section 2
Microservices

15
Introduction
While a single vendor provides standard applications in the case
of monolith systems, microservices-based systems make use of
many components that work together. They consist of several
independent software components that cater to the needs of
diverse business functions. The independent software
components are referred to as "microservices." They are nothing
but ready-to-use SaaS applications. Organizations can also build
custom services to enhance performance and add value to the
platform.

16 www.sayonetech.com
 Storefront Other Channels

Standard SaaS Products Custom Functionality

Content Search Custom

Service

Catalog
Cart
Price
Order
Promotion

API Vendors Custom Services

Microservices Architecture
The microservices architecture is different from that of the
monolith. While all the business functions are enabled through
one software application in the case of a monolith, the
microservices architecture integrates a selection of independent
software components. In the case of microservices:

17 www.sayonetech.com
 Data and functionality are embedded in services.

Microservices communicate via well-defined APIs.

The technology employed for building services is irrelevant.

Services, which are deployed separately, maybe scaled

independently.

Each service has its own database.

Storefront works independently of other modules.

Services are headless.

Jeff Bezos, who revealed his architectural manifesto in 2002, had

indicated most of these aspects, and this is what contributed to
the success of his organization Amazon. Today’s SaaS vendors
build products using MACH principles, which make them modular
and easily deployable, maintainable, and scalable. As a result,
microservices architecture is appropriate for both current and
future business needs.

Advantages
The microservices architecture has been developed based on
the knowledge and experience gained through the use of
monolithic applications over many years. Microservices have the
ability to address problems posed by monoliths. The advantages
include:

18 www.sayonetech.com
 Cutting-edge functionality as the best services are
selected

A shorter time to market is possible because of the use of

readymade components

Capability to make use of modern frontends and support

for multiple channels.

Higher quality as well as test automation

Flexible scalability, improved performance, and better cost

allocation

Freedom to choose technology stacks

Improved delivery efficiency and team agility

Reduced maintenance costs as system upgrades can be

avoided

Scalability and
Best of Breed
Performance

Time-to-Market Modern Tech

Ready to Use Stacks

Modern Frontends Increased

and CX Delivery Efficiency

Quality/Test
Agility and efficiency
Automation

19 www.sayonetech.com
Monolith to Microservices
In addition to covering all the functionality offered by a monolith,
the new microservices architecture opens up more opportunities
for organizations. However, the system’s key capabilities have to
be determined and a plan put in place and covered by SaaS
products or custom services. Fortunately, a wide range of cloud
services are available today, and they provide a variety of
options for businesses. Furthermore, the need to build custom
modules from scratch rarely arises as the existing products could
be augmented for a specific application.

Selection of Vendors
Among the SaaS products available on the market, many adhere
to the MACH principles. Cloud-native, API-driven, and headless
applications are the best options when it comes to supporting an
organization’s long-term microservices strategy by ensuring
agility, stability, and flexibility. As the concept of microservices
gains traction, the availability of top-class products is also on the
rise.

A few important aspects to keep in mind when selecting vendors:

In the case of transactional commerce, it is best to opt for

commerce tools that are truly cloud-native, scalable, and
flexible.

20 www.sayonetech.com
 For search and navigation, there are many companies that
offer mature cloud products.

When it comes to Digital Experience Platforms (DXPs) and

Content Management Systems, a broad selection of
products are available.

Product Information (PIM) and digital asset management

(DAM) systems are independent units and are not core
parts of the microservices architecture. Modern lightweight
PIMs provide interfaces for both APIs and batch processing.

Storefronts are being considered as key assets in today’s

world of PWAs and multi-channel commerce. Most
organizations often project their own frontends or make
use of a modern Frontend-as-a-Service solution.

Unlike in the case of monoliths, wherein the different parts are

included in one product, the components of a business ecosys-
tem are built as dedicated modules in a microservices architec-
ture. The independently serviceable modules assure lasting value
for organizations.

Migration to Microservices
It is not possible to simply apply the principles of microservices
architecture to a monolithic application and a real retrofit option
is not available since the monolith architecture is fundamentally

21 www.sayonetech.com
different. This necessitates the creation of a new platform as part
of the transformation process, taking into account the unique
business value that has been built into monolith systems over the
years.

As such, companies cannot expect to migrate from a monolith to

the microservices architecture in one stroke. They should aim for
a gradual and progressive transition towards the new
architecture. At this point, it is a good idea for you to consider the
current structure of your business ecosystem and how you can
bring together the different elements to achieve the desired
functionality. This will smoothen out the transition from your
existing monolithic commerce application to a modern
commerce platform that is based on the microservices
architecture.

22 www.sayonetech.com