SAP announces Sydney data centre for Hybris and builds citizen services platform with UXC Oxygen

SAP has announced Sydney as the location for the first Asia-Pacific & Japan data centre for its Hybris e-commerce platform.

The vendor decided to open a Sydney footprint to meet the demand for locally hosted cloud-based solutions and address concerns over regional data hosting. This is only the company's third global data centre for Hybris: the first was built in Boston, US in 2012 and the second in Frankfurt, Germany in 2013.

The data centre will host SAP Hybris Commerce Cloud Edition, and there are plans to introduce other cloud products, including SAP Hybris-as-a-service, Hybris Engagement Centre, Hybris Cloud for Customer and Hybris Marketing.

This is not the company's first local data centre: in November 2014, SAP announced a $150 million investment into a data centre and an institute for digital government in Canberra. The software vendor also has a HANA Enterprise Cloud data centre in Sydney, launched in April 2014.

Partner project

SAP has opened up on a Hybris-based solution being developed by Australian partner UXC Oxygen to help government organisations around the world deliver omnichannel citizen services.

According to UXC Oxygen director Stuart Dickinson, the development of New Citizen Engagement started in October 2015 and the solution, available globally, has been tested to identify what governments need from the solution.

"SAP was looking for a partner to bring a solution to the public sector and we had a lot of interest as we have been doing a lot of work with Hybris," said Dickinson.

The solution allows end-users to navigate content through a single user interface that sits in each user's personal account. The citizen engagement accelerator aims to provide an easier way to handle documents, requests, payments, permits and registrations in areas including public services, social services, tax and revenue management and grantor requests, according to SAP.

"For us is an opportunity to build a global relationship with SAP. This is the first time we have done something like this, which gave us a lot of experience building on our existing capabilities and can take us further," added Dickinson.

UXC Oxygen was awarded SAP Hybris service delivery partner of the year in 2015 and SAP Hybris APJ partner of the year 2012, 2013 and 2014.

SAP Hybris Australia global industry principal for public sector Kathleen O’Brien said: "The digital economy has impacted the way consumers engage with brands, and the same applies for interacting with government agencies.

"We believe the public sector has a great opportunity to transform and improve citizen engagement by equipping and empowering them to meet these expectations quickly, efficiently and through digital channels."