Case Study

C.H.BECK The company C.H.Beck has been producing reliable and renowned publications for the legal profession for nearly 250 years. The publisher is also an online book retailer virtually stocking over 14 million products sold as digital downloads as well as hard and soft-cover books shipped all across Europe. C.H.BECK The challenge Their online store ran off a 15-year-old commerce system and couldn’t keep up with growing demands. Founded: 1764 The self-built solution became harder and more expensive to maintain. In part, the monolith was very Headquarter: , Microsoft-centric and featured outdated components Industry: Publishing based on in-house developments. The data migration part of the project was massive; requiring the move Employees: > 600 of nearly 14 million products including categories, attributes and additional information to a new system.

Partner: The solution

The old architecture was replaced in phases and the systems involved were successively decoupled from one another. C.H.Beck selected commercetools’ scalable, cloud-native commerce platform and opted for Microsoft Azure for the cloud infrastructure.

The result Within ten months, standard technologies were interwoven with a network of individually programmed microservices that today are automated in Microsoft’s cloud computing platform (“Azure”). For customers, this means a seamless and personalized omnichannel experience. 14 Million books in the cloud

Nearly 250 years of publishing history and state-of-the-art cloud architecture — how does it all match up? For the C.H.Beck publishing company, it fits like a glove. To that end, this tradition-rich publisher is perfectly prepared for the future of digital commerce. A combination of the flexible commercetools microservices platform and Microsoft Azure will successively replace the existing monolithic system. Moreover, the transformation happens during normal business hours unbeknownst to the customer thanks to commercetools’ “headless” functionality and an architecture that can easily be migrated in phases.

Commerce migration for an eCommerce pioneer

Legal expertise has been C.H.Beck’s calling card At the time of the commerce platform migration, for almost 250 years. Yet at Beck, business lineage 14 million products, a large number of categories, spanning nearly ten generations does not mean attributes and additional information was being they relied on ancient business practices. As early maintained totaling two to five million dataset as 1998, the publisher first relied on eCommerce changes per day. The existing system – a slowly as a sales platform for its own publishing morphing, monolithic in-house development products. C.H.Beck has since become a literary based on Microsoft – was hardly able to keep up. book retailing giant with over 14 million online Aging in-house commerce platforms like the one products: The publisher distributes its complete developed by C.H.Beck, not only generate fixed range of available magazines and books in its costs in terms of programming and fixing bugs, online shops. IT will eventually reach its limits when it comes to flexibility and development speed.

“After about 15 years of development, our eCommerce platform was somewhat outdated and additional developments were increasingly tedious and costly. Beyond that, we wanted to use more standard technologies to better benefit from market developments.”

– Patrik Holtz, C.H.BECK eCommerce Manager The requirement: new life for four sales platforms

C.H.Beck specified the use of a cloud-based house); an address database and an ERP system solution; thus requiring a step-by-step move from which processed orders and managed internal their existing on-prem solution. commercetools processes were also running in the background. agency partner dotSource, together with the At BECK, they wanted faster time-to-market. client, decided on a smart mix of existing Adjustments to meet market trends or to adjust applications from the commercetools platform their portfolio needed to be integrated more and individual microservices. As for their expeditiously and cost-effectively and then easily cloud infrastructure, they went with Microsoft communicated through all retail channels. Azure. The resulting flexibility translates to cost savings for hardware since server purchases are “Systems fit in with our architecture when eliminated from future expenses. the technical ideas behind them make sense to us. They have to help us from a The migration project included four platforms and their backends: beckshop.de, C.H.Beck, functional standpoint and feature the most the BECKAKADEMIE (Beck Academy) for legal generic communication possibilities to other seminars as well as the Vahlen Verlag (publishing systems.” – Carl Heinze, C.H.BECK Project Manager

The implementation: piece by piece migration

Implementing four platforms with 14 million The commercetools platform’s microservices products and their backends would seem diffi- approach soon won them over: many features cult to coordinate at first glance. To ensure all were already fully programmed. Still others could available IT resources were on hand, they decid- be recreated accurately with a reasonable amount ed to implement it during day-to-day business. of effort. Over a ten-month implementation Gradually, the old, rigid architecture was to be period, nearly 80 microservices were individually completely replaced and participating systems developed which now run automatically in the were to be successively decoupled from each Azure cloud. They complement flexible API other. Existing processes and strategies first had endpoints of the commercetools platform which to be questioned: individual processes needed to depict standard functionalities such as product become more transparent while standard systems information, shopping cart and checkout. were to absorb the functions of a large number of self-implementations.

“From our perspective, a modular architecture is worthwhile, especially because it dissolves the complexity. There was no big migration plan for the overall architecture which made for piecemeal implementation. Obviously, it’s a demanding project. But we’re getting to grips with the complexity since we started migrating the first components two years ago. Parts of our current live systems are already being handled by migrated components. It’s been working really well so far and as you can imagine, this method is very secure.” – Carl Heinze, C.H.BECK Project Manager www.chbeck.de

The result: communicative on every retail channel

Also linked via APIs was the editorial product personalized omnichannel experience that can maintenance via AngularJS; in this way, product be flexibly expanded at any time. The goal: an data can be imported by major customers uncomplicated way to successfully negotiate the as well as supplemented and processed by digital transformation of tomorrow. C.H.Beck is in-house employees. These can then be used proving that brands rooted in history can find in communication in a variety of ways — from success by embracing next-generation commerce online content to catalog editing at the publishing technology. house. With the new constantly evolving solution, C.H.Beck offers its customers a seamless and

About commercetools commercetools is a next-generation software technology company providing the building blocks commercetools GmbH for the new digital commerce age. The cloud- Adams-Lehmann-Str. 44 native platform enables brands and retailers to 80797 Munich, Germany build innovative shopping experiences across all T: +49 89 9982996-0 touchpoints like web, mobile, voice, and in-car. E: [email protected] Founded in 2006 commercetools is one of the fastest growing enterprise software companies in Europe with 170 employees at its European www.commercetools.com (Munich, , Jena, , London) and Munich - Berlin - Jena - Amsterdam - London US offices (Durham) serving international brands Durham NC such as Bang & Olufsen, Carhartt WIP, C.H.Beck, Cimpress and Express.

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