Editor’s note: Google Cloud partner commercetools shares how modern technologies like composable commerce, cloud-native infrastructure and artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML) will lead the way in business-to-business (B2B) digital commerce this year.

Digital commerce in B2B has been predicted as the next big thing for years; yet, at the start of COVID-19, 60% of B2B companies had zero or limited eCommerce capabilities. The pandemic accelerated digitization and eCommerce has finally taken off: As of February 2022, 65% of B2B companies offered eCommerce capabilities.

The behavior of B2B buyers is also changing: Consumer-like expectations are at the heart of successful B2B commerce, and this is how manufacturers, distributors and wholesalers will shape their customer experiences. Today, 73% of B2B buyers want a personalized business-to-consumer or B2C-like experience. 83% prefer ordering or paying through digital commerce and 72% are eager to purchase across channels.

With digital commerce dictating how B2Bs will grow in 2023 and beyond, what trends will spur digital transformations across this business model? Here’s what the team at commercetools expects to unfold in B2B eCommerce this year.

#1 B2B firms are switching to cloud-native, composable commerce

B2B players still plagued with manual processes and siloed backend systems will move away from monolithic platforms and choose composable commerce. In a nutshell, composability enables businesses to select best-of-breed components, such as search, cart or checkout, and “compose” them into a custom application.

B2B firms will modernize their commerce backend, interoperating siloed systems like Configure Price Quote solutions (CPQs) for sales and enterprise resource planning solutions (ERPs) for order entry with an API-first and composable commerce stack. They will also pivot from on-premise deployments to cloud-native architectures as the baseline for auto-scaling capabilities instead of pre-provisioning online capacity during traffic peaks. That way, B2Bs can customize customer-centric experiences to boost revenue while reducing the complexity and cost of in-house IT infrastructure, as well as gaining operational efficiencies

B2Bs will maximize the cross-section of composable commerce and cloud-native infrastructure by leveraging a commerce backend like commercetools Composable Commerce hosted on Google Cloud. This combined solution provides commercetools’ ready-to-use components built as microservices and exposed as APIs, such as product information management (PIM) and unified cart, integrated through the Google Cloud Marketplace.

#2 Strong focus on data quality and personalization

Focusing on data quality continues to be a big trend in 2023. B2B buyers expect product, pricing, inventory and shipping data points to be accurate across every touchpoint so they can make better purchasing decisions, such as when to order products and calculate quantities.

With so many data points to capture throughout the customer journey — product, inventory, pricing and customer data — we’ll see more B2B companies reorganizing their vast information pools to elevate customer experiences. They will pivot to modular and API-first solutions, plus flexible data models, so they can break data silos from legacy monolithic platforms and access such data when needed.

We also expect to see more customer analytics to unlock data on buyer behavior. By understanding what customers see, click and add to their shopping lists, B2B businesses get valuable insights into how buyers behave, using this data in the shopping journey according to product interests. That way, it’s possible to offer personalized experiences across touchpoints without hassle.

“It is important for B2B companies to look at their data as if it is one of their products; invest in its upkeep and integrity while finding ways to continuously improve it. Using advanced analytics powered by AI and ML to identify patterns from large amounts of data, B2B companies can activate insights into customer decision journeys to maintain loyalty, personalize experiences to improve satisfaction and boost revenue, while also finding ways to optimize costs. For example, with analytics, enterprises can streamline spend to focus on the highest-performing channels and reduce waste.” — Carrie Tharp, Google Cloud VP of Retail and Consumer

With data-driven tools coming into play like Google Cloud’s Discovery AI, Recommendations AI and Vision Product Search connected with composable commerce, B2B players can boost customer analytics to personalize experiences, improve customer satisfaction and reduce churn.

#3 The B2B customer experience will be redesigned

B2B players are taking a page out of the B2C playbook to elevate experiences throughout the customer journey. While intense work needs to happen in the backend commerce engine, B2B players will also redesign their digital frontends. That means boosting website performance, while mobile responsiveness and personalization will be at the forefront of these advanced digital initiatives.

More than ever, B2B companies are looking for digital storefronts delivered as progressive web applications (PWAs) for optimized performance and responsiveness across devices, as well as fast-loading and responsive experiences to boost your digital presence, SEO rankings and conversion rate. B2Bs can further streamline frontend development with solutions natively connecting to Google Cloud Marketplace, which supports a variety of storefront providers, including commercetools Frontend.

Leveraging Google Cloud’s unique capabilities, such as PWA web app development, Google Cloud Discovery AI solutions that include Retail Search and Vision API Product Search, among many others, B2B companies are well positioned to boost digital commerce in the years to come.

What’s next in 2023?

2022 was already a turbulent year; for better or worse, 2023 is expected to have a similar fate. For B2Bs, even the ones with tight budgets, investing in digital commerce can help future-proof businesses for whatever’s happening this year. To dive deeper into all predictions and insights by commercetools in collaboration with Google Cloud, read the guide Pivotal Trends and Predictions in B2B Digital Commerce in 2023.

What do CIOs and CTOs deliver for the company? If you said “technology,” that’s just the beginning. According to their research, McKinsey found that 85% of CIOs and CTOs interviewed in the spring of 2019 said they were essential for at least two of the three most common CEO priorities—revenue acceleration, improved agility and time to market, and cost reduction.

IT modernization – including migrating to the cloud – is key to business growth and agility.

Yet, according to a recent McKinsey study, 80% of CIOs report that regardless of their level of cloud migration, they still haven’t reached their projected agility and business benefits.

Sometimes, this is because of issues like training and skills gaps in the IT workforce. Surprisingly often though, the barrier to reaching the goals is based on trade-offs that CIOs themselves feel they must make to strike a balance between the perfect and the possible.

But what if you could have it all without the trade-offs? As Will Grannis, Managing Director of the CTO Office at Google, and Arul Elumalai, Partner at McKinsey & Company discussed in our recent digital conference, many of the compromises CIOs make can be avoided with new technology, modern architectures and by encouraging a transformation mindset across the business.

In interviews, CIOs explained how they’ve leveraged the best of the cloud without compromising on security, agility, and flexibility. Here’s how these leaders avoid three of the top perceived trade-offs—both with technology and by transforming their operating model.

Trade-off #1: Developer agility vs. control and governance
Moving to the cloud offers new opportunities for speed, but 69% of organizations indicate that stringent security guidelines and code review processes can slow developers significantly.

One CISO of a multinational company mentioned that cloud development was so fast that they had to institute manual checks on their developers’ code. So much for agility. 

To overcome this trade-off and maintain both speed and security, some respondents found success in DevOps, hiring security-experienced talent and introducing automation for security and quality. Building in security into the CI/CD pipeline and increasing automation don’t just eliminate the tradeoff, they result in higher quality and faster innovation.

At Google Cloud, we’ve also observed that customers with strong DevOps practices have increased speed-to-market and product/service quality. From our own journey, we’ve learned seven critical lessons essential to adopting a DevOps model, ranging from taking up small projects and embracing open source to building an overall DevOps culture.

Trade-off #2: Single-vendor benefits vs. freedom from lock-in
CIOs perceive benefits to using the fewest number of clouds, specifically avoiding introducing multiple systems that require their teams to develop and maintain multiple skillsets. Unfortunately, 83% of the CIOs interviewed said that while they would prefer fewer clouds, the potential financial and technical lock-in drives them to multiple providers. 

Successful CIOs said that they can avoid lock-in pitfalls not just with contractual guardrails and executive and board education, but with evolving hybrid cloud technologies that provide additional choices.

Hybrid cloud platforms based on containers can further mitigate the risk of using a single cloud vendor. The key to successful hybrid architectures is the infrastructure abstraction and portability that containers create for them, enabling disparate environments to work together. 

This notion has been at the heart of our strategy at Google Cloud with Anthos, which provides an abstraction layer and an application modernization platform for hybrid and multi-cloud environments.

Enterprises can use Anthos to modernize how they develop, secure, and operate hybrid-cloud environments and enable consistency across cloud environments.

Trade-off #3: Best-of-breed tools vs. standardization and familiarity
Optimizing tool chains for different environments can improve productivity, but many CIOs believe that this means reduced functionality and tools.

While 77% of CIOs said they had to standardize to the lowest common denominator, some have found a better solution. Rather than giving up the languages, libraries, and frameworks that their teams prefer, effective leaders said that they found success by investing in training programs to upscale talent and adopting new open and vendor-agnostic solutions. Architectures that are based on open-source components have been the keys that helped remove this tradeoff, and eliminate the notion of a lowest common denominator. 

This is why we have built Anthos on open-source components like Kubernetes, Istio and Knative. Anthos gives your business the choice you need. With the ability to create code that works in most environments using the tools, languages, and systems you prefer, you can do more without major changes to how you work.

Regardless of your current cloud adoption level, check out “Unlock business acceleration in a hybrid cloud world” to discover more about McKinsey’s findings, including how CIOs drive agility, methods to make trade-offs unnecessary, and how to prepare your team for the cloud. Then, stay tuned for subsequent posts that  take a closer look at how hybrid solutions and strategies can help CIOs drive a transformation mindset across the business—without compromising on security, agility, and flexibility.

When your business is rapidly adding new employees, expanding to new countries, and always focused on staying ahead of the competition, you have to take a hard look at the tools that are slowing you down—and swap them out for better ones that can keep pace with the company. We’re expanding YoungCapital in Germany, which means more offices, more people, and more technology to make the business run smoothly. 

As we scale, Google Cloud tools like Chromebooks and G Suite help us grow our business efficiently. They free us up from sluggish, time-intensive technology that’s hard to maintain and repair, and give us the freedom to work together in faster, smarter ways.

Free from hours of device setup. Some months, there are as many as 40 new employees starting at YoungCapital—and as we continue to expand that number will continue to rise, especially now that we’ve opened three new offices in Germany. With our old Windows desktops, setting up new computers could take up to an hour per employee (which can add up to about 40 hours a month for IT). Today, using Chrome Enterprise tools, it takes about five minutes to get an Acer Spin or Pixelbook ready to hand off to a new hire—saving us more than three months per year of device setup time.

Free from VPNs. Our previous Windows machines required a complicated virtual private network (VPN) for accessing corporate files outside of the office. Using a VPN was complicated for our employees because the software wasn’t intuitive; if an employee had trouble signing into the VPN while at home or traveling, they could not log in and work as quickly as they needed to. With Chromebooks, all you need is an online connection to sign into G Suite to access files and work from anywhere. 

From our perspective, Chromebooks are resistant to threats like ransomware and phishing attacks, giving us confidence that our data can stay secure. With Chrome Enterprise Upgrade, our IT admins can strengthen security even further: for example, by enabling advanced security features that help block vulnerabilities, locking down lost or stolen devices right away, and setting device security policies in the cloud so devices everywhere are safer. 

Free from infrastructure. We used to have to invest in servers, and then add more time and money to keep them running. Now we don’t have to run the business on infrastructure or hire people to maintain it—we can just use Google’s cloud. NextNovate is helping us make the most of Google Cloud Platform, like integrating some of our proprietary applications with G Suite and building our own add-ons. For example, we created a button for Gmail that connects to our job candidate database; when candidates email us, we can click on the button and see their profiles and work experience. 

Free from multiple passwords and logins. Chrome Browser and G Suite with single sign-provider SAML are the portal to all the productivity apps our employees need. Once people log in to G Suite, they don’t have to remember a bunch of other user names and passwords. The IT team loves it too, because we don’t have to spend hours zeroing out passwords and creating new ones.

Free to manage cross-country devices easily in the cloud. Our four-person IT support team, which keeps our systems humming, hasn’t grown, even though we’ve doubled the number of employees. When we were on Windows devices, we fielded roughly 1,800 IT support requests every month. Now we get about 1,300 requests a month, from a much bigger employee base. This translates to nearly 30% fewer requests for our lean support team, which reduces their workload significantly even though we have roughly 20% more employees—all made possible with Chrome Enterprise. 

Being free of slow, high-maintenance technology doesn’t just make the IT department happy—people are actually changing how they work. They no longer send files to each other by email or struggle to keep track of versions; they store everything in Google Drive and work together in Google Docs on a single document at the same time. And instead of traveling to other offices, connecting with each other in video conferences on Hangouts Meet has become a completely natural way to do business.

With Chromebooks and G Suite, we’re ready for anything: more new markets, more employees, and more-flexible ways to work together and shake up the staffing industry.