SAP Hybris Introduces New Services to Help Companies Cope With GDPR

SAP Hybris Introduces New Services to Help Companies Cope With GDPR

Leveraging its acquisition of Gigya last fall, SAP Hybris has released three new services designed to help companies comply with the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation.

The European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) gives EU citizens and visitors extensive new privacy rights when it comes to how enterprises collect, story and use personal data and promises severe financial penalties for organizations that fail to safeguard it.

The SAP Hybris’ GDPR solutions rely heavily on services it acquired last September with the purchase of Gigya, a provider of customer identity and access management services. Gigya said at the time of the purchase last September that it managed 1.3 billion customer identities.

SAP Hybris had been a Gigya partner since 2013 and had customers that use access-management systems with components from both SAP Hybris and Gigya.

Now fully integrated with SAP Hybris, the new services can help organizations quickly and securely scale to manage billions of identities and thousands of digital properties across hundreds of brands to help companies meet new and evolving requirements of privacy and data protection regulations around the world, according to the company.

The new SAP Hybris services are arriving at a time when enterprises are scrambling to provide software and services to help customers comply with GDPR. Microsoft, for example, has a cloud-based GDPR dashboard that helps companies track how well their Azure and Office 365 environments comply with the regulations.

The specific three new offerings are SAP Hybris Identity, SAP Hybris Consent and SAP Hybris Profile.

With Hybris Identity, companies can establish secure customer registration and login across websites, mobile applications and Internet of Things devices using flexible user authentication options, federation standards and single sign-on functionality. It captures and stores customer identity data for trusted and personalized digital experiences while also helping to protect consumers against identity fraud and data theft.

Hybris Consent presents and captures customer consent for terms of service and privacy agreements, including cookie consent and marketing communications. For auditing purposes, consent agreements and consent history are tracked across the customer lifecycle.

All of this information can be synchronized with marketing, sales and service applications. On the end user side, customers have control of their personal information with features for consent revocation, data export and account deletion. Consent records are stored in a secure data vault.

Hybris Profile gives companies a single customer view of identity information, profile attributes and other system data that can be orchestrated in real time or in batches to virtually any application, service or data warehouse.

Organizations can govern all the information in these single customer views throughout the customer’s lifecycle. If consumer consent is granted, SAP Hybris customers can analyze data within these single customer views to plan, predict and optimize digital experiences to support sales and services.

Analyst Charles King said SAP’s new offerings are very timely and should be well-received.

“While GDPR will become the law of the land on May 25, for companies doing business within the EU, the vast majority of organizations have ignored the issue and are unprepared,” King, principal analyst at Pund-IT, told eWEEK in an email.

“Through its Hybris platform and the new Identity, Consent and Profile solutions, SAP will help customers effectively cope with these new regulations while minimally disrupting their businesses and core processes,” King added. “The solutions should attract the interest of both existing and prospective SAP customers.”

Gigya CEO Patrick Salyer said companies will see benefits to complying with GDPR to the extent it establishes a new level of trust with consumers.

“If data is the new oil, then trust is the ultimate currency that drives this new data economy,” Salyer said in a statement. “To create trust, consumers demand transparency and control over how their customer data is managed. GDPR goes further by legally requiring it. With these new SAP Hybris offerings from Gigya, we can provide one of the only solutions on the market that create trusted customer relationships,” Salyer’s statement said.