Two different pressures are prompting SAP Commerce customers to reconsider their architecture. Some are still running on-premise Hybris and facing a hard end-of-maintenance deadline. Others already made an earlier move to SAP Commerce Cloud v1 (CCv1) and are now working through a second migration to Commerce Cloud v2 (CCv2), the model SAP now positions as its primary cloud deployment path. Different starting points, same destination — and the same risk: treating the move as purely a platform upgrade, and missing the opportunity sitting right next to it.
That opportunity is the customer experience itself, and specifically, search and product discovery. It’s easy for a migration budget and timeline to absorb every ounce of attention hosting, infrastructure, and compliance demand, while the thing customers actually interact with — can they find what they’re looking for — gets carried over unchanged. Upgrading SAP is the necessary half of this project. Upgrading what customers experience on top of it is the half that’s easy to skip, and the one this piece is about.
The End of an Era for SAP Commerce On-Premise
SAP Commerce version 2205 — the final on-premise release of the platform still widely known as Hybris — reached end of mainstream maintenance (EoMM) on July 31, 2026. That date has passed. Others previously moved to SAP Commerce Cloud v1 and now want to assess a move to SAP Commerce Cloud in the public cloud, commonly called CCv2. SAP has positioned this as its strategic cloud deployment model, although the timing and commercial terms of migration can vary by customer contract. For organisations operating self managed SAP Commerce installations on that release, the deadline creates an immediate need to review their support and upgrade plans.
EoMM doesn’t mean the software suddenly stops working, but the scope of support narrows significantly. SAP can continue resolving known problems, while new issues may require additional time-and-materials support. There are no further adaptations for new legal or technical requirements, and third-party libraries are no longer updated as part of mainstream maintenance. In practical terms, the platform can keep running, but it is no longer evolving with the technology and security landscape around it.
That creates particular pressure for complex and regulated businesses, including manufacturers, distributors, and wholesalers, where commerce infrastructure is deeply connected to ERP, pricing, inventory, customer entitlements, and other business-critical systems.
Implementation timelines vary widely depending on complexity. Some SAP implementation partners report standard SAP Commerce Cloud projects completing in four to eight months, while heavily customized environments, multi-country deployments, or broader transformation programs commonly run six to twelve months or more. Either way, organizations still on Hybris now have an architectural decision in front of them.
What CCv2 Actually Changes
Both paths can lead to SAP Commerce Cloud in the public cloud, commonly referred to by customers and implementation partners as CCv2. Unlike CCv1, this model gives customers access to cloud based build, deployment and environment management through SAP Commerce Cloud Portal. It’s worth being specific about what that destination looks like, because the differences go well beyond a version number.
In CCv1, customers generally depended more heavily on SAP operations for infrastructure and deployment — changes went through a request process handled manually by SAP’s operations team, and deployments typically had to be announced at least 24 hours in advance. CCv2 introduces a much greater degree of self-service: authorised customer teams connect source control, create builds, manage environments, and initiate deployments directly through SAP Commerce Cloud Portal, using Git-based version control, automated scaling, automated disaster recovery, and quarterly feature updates instead of waiting on SAP’s release cadence.
That self-service model also supports rolling deployments and cloud-managed infrastructure — though actual availability and downtime during a release still depend on the specific application change, data migration, and deployment configuration involved.
That shift brings real migration work with it — version compatibility (CCv2 requires a supported SAP Commerce release), data and media migration, and rebuilding pieces that CCv2 doesn’t include out of the box, like SMTP. But the detail worth pulling out here is one that shows up consistently in teams’ hands-on migration accounts: if the existing solution has replaced a standard ecosystem component — Solr swapped for a different search engine, for instance — that’s flagged as something not to carry over without a deliberate decision. Migration teams don’t wave that through by default; they treat it as a genuine architectural checkpoint.
That’s precisely the checkpoint this piece has been building toward. Whether the starting point is on-premise Hybris or an existing CCv1 environment, the move to CCv2 is the moment the search and discovery layer is already being evaluated as part of the technical migration — not a separate initiative to fund later.
The real test of a modernization plan is whether the storefront you land on can meet what customers now expect from search and product discovery. And in 2026, that bar looks very different from when many Hybris and CCv1 implementations were originally designed.
If They Can’t Find It, They Won’t Buy It
Search isn’t a secondary feature of a commerce stack. It’s one of the primary ways buyers express intent.
A consumer searching for “running shoes for wide feet” is telling you what they want. A B2B buyer entering a partial SKU, technical specification, or superseded part number may be much closer to a purchase than someone casually navigating the catalog.
When the experience can’t interpret that intent, the consequences are immediate: irrelevant products, zero-result pages, unnecessary refinement, and abandoned sessions.
Independent research illustrates how widespread the problem remains. Baymard Institute’s ecommerce search UX benchmark has found that many ecommerce sites still fail basic site-search expectations or don’t adequately support the types of queries shoppers actually use.
At the same time, those queries are becoming more demanding.
Daily exposure to conversational AI has changed how people interact with digital interfaces. Someone searching for “jacket under 200 euros for hiking” increasingly expects the system to understand the product category, use case, and price constraint together — not simply look for pages containing those exact words.
The same shift matters even more in B2B commerce, where buyers may search by technical attributes, abbreviations, partial SKUs, product families, compatibility requirements, or terminology that doesn’t exactly match the catalog.
Coveo’s proprietary analysis across its customer base has also found that queries longer than five words have increased by roughly 10% since the launch of ChatGPT. Shoppers and buyers are bringing conversational search habits into commerce, whether or not the platforms they’re using were built to understand them.
That’s why search shouldn’t become an afterthought in a Hybris migration.
If the new environment simply reproduces the discovery experience of the legacy storefront, the organization may solve an infrastructure problem without materially improving how customers find and buy products.
What a Modernization Plan Should Actually Evaluate
Before comparing vendors, it’s useful to define what modern product discovery needs to accomplish for a complex SAP environment.
A few questions quickly separate foundational search from a more advanced product discovery strategy:
- Semantic and natural-language understanding: Can the engine understand intent rather than relying primarily on exact keyword matches? Can it interpret compound queries and constraints such as price, size, application, or compatibility?
- Product and content discovery: Can buyers find relevant technical documentation, buying guides, videos, articles, and other content alongside products when those resources help inform a purchase?
- Personalization: Can relevance adapt to the context and behavior of an individual shopper or buyer in real time?
- Business-aware ranking: Can the organization optimize discovery toward outcomes such as revenue, margin, inventory priorities, or other KPIs while preserving relevance?
- Merchandising and explainability: Can merchandising teams understand why products rank where they do, measure the impact of their decisions, and intervene without creating an ever-growing collection of manual rules?
- Enterprise complexity: Can search respect market-specific catalogs, availability, pricing, entitlements, languages, brands, and other requirements common to large B2B and B2C SAP implementations?
Those questions matter because “search” is no longer just the box at the top of the storefront. It increasingly determines the experience across search results, product listing pages, category navigation, recommendations, and conversational discovery.
If you’re running a formal evaluation, Coveo published a 200-question RFP template and weighted vendor scorecard built around these same criteria — a useful starting point for turning this list into a structured comparison across vendors.
Where Native SAP Search Ends and Advanced Product Discovery Begins
SAP’s own search capabilities have matured considerably.
SAP Commerce Cloud’s built-in Search Service — running on Apache Solr, the open-source search platform underneath it — provides a solid keyword-search foundation: segment-based personalization, manual merchandising, and it’s included in the standard SAP Commerce license. For simpler, single-market catalogs, that’s often a reasonable stopping point, and it’s the same Solr layer the earlier migration checkpoint refers to when a customized or replaced search component gets flagged during a CCv2 move.
SAP also offers a paid step up beyond the base Search Service, delivered through Intelligent Selling Services (ISS) and its Personalized Search capability. This layers machine learning onto the Solr foundation and moves beyond segment-level rules toward genuine individual-level personalization — using each shopper’s own browsing history and behavior to reorder results in real time. That’s a meaningfully more capable option than segmentation alone, and worth evaluating on its own merits for organizations that need more tailored experiences.
Even with that layer in place, the underlying search technology remains fundamentally keyword-based rather than semantic. Matching “sneakers” to “trainers” still typically depends on a manually configured synonym rule, and blending product results with technical documentation, buying guides, or other content sits outside what the native stack is built to do — that gap is architectural, not something the personalization layer closes. For straightforward catalogs, none of that is usually a dealbreaker. For complex, multi-brand, or heavily B2B catalogs, it’s typically where the ceiling shows up first.
For organizations with relatively straightforward requirements, the native SAP stack may be a reasonable stopping point.
That’s important to acknowledge, because the modernization decision shouldn’t start with the assumption that native SAP search is inadequate. The better question is how far the organization needs its product discovery capabilities to go.
Complex enterprises may need to unify products with rich content, understand natural-language intent semantically, optimize ranking against commercial KPIs, support sophisticated merchandising, or account for intricate combinations of inventory, pricing, customer entitlements, markets, languages, and catalogs.
At that point, the conversation changes from “Do we have search?” to “What should product discovery do for the business?”
And that is where Coveo belongs in the modernization discussion.
Why Coveo Belongs in the Modernization Plan
Coveo has held SAP Endorsed App status for SAP Commerce Cloud since March 2023. It also provides an SAP Commerce integration designed to connect product catalogs and storefront discovery with Coveo’s AI search and product discovery platform.
That means search modernization doesn’t have to be treated as an unrelated initiative after the Commerce Cloud migration. It can be evaluated as part of the same architecture and customer-experience roadmap.
What Coveo adds is an AI-powered discovery layer that can extend across the shopping journey.
Semantic, intent-aware search. Coveo can use semantic understanding alongside traditional relevance signals to interpret what buyers mean, not simply the words they type. Natural-language queries, typos, and complex product intent can be handled without depending entirely on manually maintained synonym dictionaries and rules.
Unified product and content discovery. Coveo can bring products together with the content customers use to make purchasing decisions — from buying guides and expert articles to technical documentation and how-to content — within the same discovery experience.
Intelligent product listings. Search isn’t the only place relevance matters. Coveo can apply AI-driven ranking across category and product listing pages as well, extending personalization and relevance to shoppers who browse rather than search.
Personalized recommendations. Recommendation strategies can use shopper behavior and context to surface relevant products throughout the journey, including personalized recommendations, popular products, recently viewed items, and other discovery experiences.
Business-aware optimization. Relevance doesn’t have to optimize only for the closest textual match. Coveo’s Business KPI Optimization capabilities can incorporate commercial objectives such as revenue and profitability into ranking while keeping shopper relevance at the center of the experience.
Merchandising with explainability. Merchandisers can understand why products are ranking where they are, apply business strategies on top of AI, analyze performance, and use AI-assisted merchandising capabilities to manage discovery without relying on IT for every adjustment.
Conversational product discovery. Natural-language discovery can be grounded in the same indexed catalog and content that powers search, giving shoppers a conversational way to explore products without creating a completely separate discovery experience with its own relevance logic.
Together, those capabilities make search, listings, recommendations, and conversational discovery parts of the same product-discovery strategy rather than disconnected features.
Modernization Should Improve the Business, Not Just the Architecture
There is already evidence of what that can look like in an SAP environment.
Blackwoods, an Australian industrial supplier running SAP Commerce Cloud with Coveo, reported a 45% increase in Net Promoter Score and 44% fewer null searches following its digital transformation.
Boston Scientific, a medical device manufacturer running SAP Commerce Cloud with Coveo, achieved a 16% lift in search conversion, 13% higher search engagement, and 15% better customer retention following its shift to AI-powered search.
Those are the kinds of outcomes a modernization program should ultimately be designed to produce.
Infrastructure stability matters. Supported software matters. Cloud architecture matters. But customers don’t experience any of those things directly. They experience whether they can find the right product, whether the system understands what they’re trying to accomplish, and whether navigating a catalog with thousands — or millions — of possible products feels effortless or frustrating.
Treat This as an Opportunity, Not Just an Emergency
The question facing organizations still running SAP Hybris isn’t simply, “How do we get off end-of-mainstream-maintenance software?”
It’s whether the migration becomes a strategic upgrade or primarily recreates the existing experience on newer infrastructure.
That doesn’t mean every SAP Commerce Cloud migration requires a new search platform. It means the search decision should be made deliberately while the architecture is already being reconsidered.
The timing matters.
Teams migrating from Hybris are already reworking integrations, validating data flows, testing storefront experiences, retraining teams, and making decisions that may shape the commerce architecture for years. Evaluating product discovery during that process is fundamentally different from reopening the architecture after the migration because the new storefront didn’t deliver the customer or commercial improvements the business expected.
SAP remains the commerce backbone: pricing, inventory, checkout, order processing, and the transactional capabilities the migration needs to preserve.
Coveo can provide the discovery intelligence layer that helps shoppers and buyers navigate that commerce environment — across search, product listings, recommendations, content, and conversational experiences.
Whether the project on your roadmap is labeled an EoMM migration or a CCv1-to-CCv2 upgrade, it will get scoped, staffed, and budgeted as a platform initiative. That’s necessary, but it isn’t sufficient. The organizations that get the most out of this moment are the ones that scope it as both: a platform upgrade and a customer experience upgrade, decided together instead of one deferred until after the other ships.
Upgrading SAP is not the finish line. It’s the opening to upgrade what your customers actually experience when they land on the storefront — starting with whether they can find what they came for.