Co-creating SAP Spartacus. The open-source storefront for SAP Commerce Cloud.

Background

SAP Commerce Cloud (formerly Hybris) is one of the world's leading enterprise commerce platforms, deployed at large retailers, manufacturers, and B2B organisations globally. By 2017, SAP recognised that the traditional server-rendered Hybris storefront was increasingly misaligned with market expectations: customers and developers wanted modern JavaScript-based frontends, headless architectures, and PWA capabilities. SAP needed a strategic partner to help co-develop the next generation of the Commerce Cloud frontend.

Divante was selected for this engagement based on their proven experience co-creating Vue Storefront — the leading open-source PWA framework for Magento — and their deep headless commerce engineering expertise. SAP's choice reflected both technical credibility and a shared commitment to open-source development methodology.

The Challenge

The project required building from near-scratch an entirely new frontend paradigm for SAP Commerce Cloud:

• The storefront had to be fully decoupled from the Hybris backend, communicating exclusively via REST API
• It had to be built on Angular — the enterprise JS framework aligned with SAP's broader technology direction
• It had to be easily upgradeable with each new Commerce Cloud release — a critical requirement given the enterprise customer base's conservative upgrade cadence
• It had to be open source, extensible, and customisable — suitable for both ISVs building on top of it and enterprise in-house teams
• It had to match the reliability and breadth of coverage that SAP Commerce Cloud enterprise customers demanded

Our Solution

The collaboration began with Divante sending 8 engineers to SAP's Montreal headquarters for a week of intensive workshops, code reviews, and architecture design sessions. The outcome was a shared technical roadmap for what would become SAP Spartacus. An interdisciplinary team of 20+ people — 8 from Divante, 15+ from SAP — worked in Agile sprints across two organisations.

Divante contributed to the core Spartacus library, B2B feature development, and community education — co-creating OpenSAP courses on Spartacus used by thousands of SAP developers globally. The first release was introduced at SAP CX Live Barcelona in October 2018; Version 3.0, which introduced the first B2B features, shipped in December 2020. A monthly release cadence was achieved and maintained.

Impact & Results

• SAP Spartacus is now the primary open-source JavaScript storefront for SAP Commerce Cloud, used in production by enterprise retailers and B2B organisations globally
• The project demonstrated Divante's ability to operate as a co-development partner at enterprise platform scale — not just as an implementation partner, but as a contributor to the platform itself
• More than 4 Spartacus services were launched through the collaboration
• The OpenSAP courses reached thousands of SAP developers