SAP Hybris moving one step closer to GDPR compliance?

29. september 2017

af Julie Hannerz

With SAPs recent announcement to acquire Gigya, a market leader in Customer Identity and Access Management, SAP is yet again adding an application to its portfolio of SAP Hybris applications. For those of you who are not familiar with them, they are specifically targeted at improving omnichannel customer experience and engagement. One might wonder how Gigya fits into this portfolio, but Gigya has actually been a SAP Hybris Partner for a couple of years now, offering Registration-as-a-Service (RaaS) and Social Login as an extension to SAP Hybris. The power of SAP Hybris to create ‘golden records’ combined with Gigya’s identity and access management platform could enable companies to offer even more data-driven and effective marketing, sales and service.

Living in a world where the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has moved to the top of the agenda of companies doing business in the European Union this acquisition could be quite interesting. Companies are required to live up to the GDPR, and though the GDPR can be interpreted slightly different from company to company, one cannot and should not underestimate the impacts of it – what it means for companies’ system landscapes and management of customer data.

The GDPR is not just about obtaining customers permission to be contacted – it deals with a vast amount of topics such as data storage, logging, deletion of data, etc. SAP Hybris applications are already offering capabilities in the area of consent- and data management, for example:

by enabling the creation of landing pages for capturing marketing permissions and subscriptions
by running application jobs for flagging and deleting contacts
by automatically executing permission-, subscription, and communication limits checks before sending out emails

These are just a few examples of what capabilities and mechanisms SAP Hybris applications have to offer. Gigya provides supplementary and complimentary features to this, including:

Centralized Customer Data Management
User Data Control
Data Localization
Social Compliance
Accessibility Compliance

Though, these features offered by Gigya are complimentary to the existing SAP Hybris applications, it is yet to be seen what impact the acquisition has on the GDPR compliance of the SAP Hybris applications.

As both SAP Hybris and GDPR are focus areas here in 2BM, we are excited to see what exactly this acquisition will bring to the SAP Hybris portfolio, and specifically what impact it will have on GDPR compliance.