r/EnterpriseArchitect

We kicked off a platform eval when our SAP Commerce mainstream maintenance ended, and there's a lot more to evaluate now than there was a few years back, so posting to see what teams in a similar shape are choosing before we commit.

The eval has been split between composable headless options and retail-native platforms, and for us the core question is whether the headless build-out is worth the engineering investment, since we're running 8 heads across multi-brand and multi-country and implementation scope is a real factor.

Salesforce Commerce Cloud has been the default path from every SI we've talked to, and it's the one we've been spending the most time on, and Scayle came up separately in a thread on here a while back in a discussion about retail-native platforms, and both come with a different trade-off.

One sits inside an ecosystem we're already in across CRM and service, the other was built by a retailer for their own multi-brand operations, so the fashion data model is native before you configure anything.

The SI recommendations and independent architecture experience seem to be giving us pretty different information, so any experience from teams who've made it through a real migration out of SAP Commerce would help.

Appreciate any pointers.

So, I remained an architect for more than 4 years and for one year I didn't have a job. I ended up getting either Senior Systems Engineer or Network Administrator/Architect job after one year. I opted for Senior Systems Engineer as the career would be more of service industry.

Here, I have implicit role as both Systems Engineer and Architect. Working without system access had been wonderful and now, as systems engineer I need access and sometimes I have to bear the administrative overhead, because once I get the access, I will be doing my job.

As a result, I am in twisted phase. I contained a pain of jobless for more than a year and didn't proceed with my own journey or start up, or gigs. I got few gigs as engineer and architecing a project map for more than 20 projects for a company as freelancer.

Now, I am perplexed and paralysed where I have ended.

What do you recommend or suggest to move forward?

One thing I keep seeing is teams start with "what should replace this platform?" before anyone has a clear picture of what actually depends on it.

Then halfway through the project someone remembers backup, monitoring, licensing, an old integration, or a workload that can't move.

I've started thinking the dependency map might matter more than the shortlist at the beginning.

Do you normally map all of that first, or does it happen during evaluation?