Migrating from Oracle Commerce ATG to commercetools with Royal Cyber

Written by Poonam Chandersy

Technical Content Writer

Leading businesses and organizations are done working with outdated Monolith Oracle Commerce platform and are looking to shift from Oracle ATG to commercetools. However, most of them are worried about the enormous investments that they have already made in ATG.

commercetools is the solution as it is a modern commerce platform designed for the future with its MACH principle that comprises of Microservices, API-first, Cloud-native, and Headless. This helps businesses migrate from ATG to modern commerce technology at an optimum peace, pricing, and strategy. Furthermore, with a philosophy of “pay for what you use,” coupled with industry-standard technologies and architecture.

Recognized as a market leader by Forrester and Gartner over a decade ago, the Oracle Commerce suite has reached its end of life. While commercetools, an innovative cloud-native platform, has become popular and has also been recognized as a leader by Forrester and Gartner in commerce software. Understanding the critical differences between the Oracle Commerce platform and commercetools is essential to comprehend their architecture and their impact on businesses.

Here we will discuss why it is time to move from Oracle Commerce as there is a new way to approach commerce. Below are a couple of reasons why Oracle Commerce is outdated and why it’s time to move on to commercetools:

Oracle Commerce commercetools
Customization Experience Oracle Commerce Developers needed to customize Developers work with well-documented APIs
Technology Java, JSP, XML configuration Language-agonistic, SDKs available for Node, Java, PHP, .NET and others
Licensing Previously core-based Usage-based
Operations Multiple application and database nodes necessary to run at scale Platform run and scaled by commercetools; only frontend hosting as an external cost
Updates & Upgrades Compulsory updates a few times a year Continuous integration, features pushed daily, non-breaking API changes
Deployment Architecture Multi-tier, high level of dependency between tiers Microservices, individually deployable and scaled
Runtime Environment Threaded application, synchronous execution Asynchronous processing, event-driven communication
Read/Write Operations Large Distributed transactions in the application, database locking at the row level Separation between read and write stores (CQRS), event sourcing

commercetools' Migration Journey

Royal Cyber's approach to migrating involves dividing an existing project into business domains and transferring the respective functionality and date out of ATG to a best-of-breed infrastructure with commercetools are its core. This entails going from an on-premise monolith to a service-oriented, headless cloud solution, with everything connected to the project. Aiming for a phased migration helps minimize disruptions to operations and mitigate risks to the best extent possible.

Choose your migration strategy strategically. Then, with Royal Cyber as your expert Migration Partner, make this migration journey seamless and successful without disrupting daily business or jeopardizing operations.

Benefits of Migrating to commercetools

  • Business Agility: Due to Oracle's complex and strict architecture, developers must work with many layers. For example, building a custom promotion and displaying it on the frontend often takes backend developers a few days to implement. The boilerplate code and the ORM data modeling are conducted via XML configuration.
  • Total Cost of Ownership (TCO): Oracle Commerce is sold in the form of core-based licenses. This proves to be a challenge for businesses, especially when it comes to scaling; if more hardware is needed because the business is growing and the traffic is peaking, more licenses must be purchased.

Businesses also need to consider that compulsory updates need to be performed as the Oracle Commerce platform evolves. With new major versions of the platform being released yearly, the updates are not easy to apply. In addition, the customizations made to the platform have a high likelihood of not being compatible with the new version, hence requiring code changes and re-testing of existing features. However, these upgrades are necessary and remain eligible for support, generating recurring costs.

Oracle Commerce platform runs on multiple application nodes and database servers, generating operation costs for hosting applications.

  • Platform Performance & Stability: Oracle Commerce's architecture makes it difficult for the solution to meet most businesses' performance and scalability requirements. Oracle Commerce is deployed using a three-tier architecture: web servers, application servers, and a database like most monolithic applications. This makes it challenging to scale, requiring businesses 2-3 months to prepare for the peak season traffic events, consuming time, and money away from new initiatives that can generate more revenue.

Conclusion

While this migrating digital assets from Oracle Commerce to commercetools is not a one-click solution, but data migration, especially catalog data can be semi-automated. This allows businesses to build a highly effective and scalable network of services, enabling innovation and growth. Additionally, businesses cannot have technical teams deal with maintenance and updates; instead, they need to build customer-facing features that generate real tangible business value.

Do you want to know how you can migrate to commercetools, what the timeline looks like and how much it will cost? Contact us and let our certified commercetools experts at Royal Cyber help you.

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