Originally reported by datacentrenews.eu. Original announcement date: June 2020.
HCL Commerce Moves to Google Cloud
HCL Technologies and Google Cloud announced an expanded partnership that makes Google Cloud the preferred cloud platform for HCL Commerce. The agreement is designed to give businesses access to Google’s global infrastructure combined with HCL’s commerce platform, enabling more scalable, data-driven customer experiences across industries.
According to the two companies, the integration aims to help organisations execute digital transformation strategies more rapidly — particularly relevant as retail and e-commerce businesses accelerate their shift to cloud-native operations.
What the Partnership Covers
- Preferred cloud platform: Google Cloud becomes the primary infrastructure provider for HCL Commerce deployments, offering global edge presence, elasticity, and reliability.
- Multi-cloud and hybrid deployments via Anthos: HCL has stated its intention to leverage Google’s Anthos platform to support multi-cloud and hybrid-cloud HCL Commerce deployments, giving enterprises flexibility in where and how they run workloads.
- Joint product roadmap: The launch of HCL Commerce on Google Cloud is described as the first of several planned joint offerings, with future focus areas including application modernisation, data centre optimisation, and database value unlock.
- Global partner ecosystem: HCL’s implementation partner network will support delivery of the combined commerce solution across verticals.
Executive Perspectives
Darren Oberst, HCL Corporate Vice President and Head of Software, framed the collaboration in terms of business resilience:
“The collaboration between Google Cloud and HCL Commerce is helping customers rapidly execute their digital transformation strategy that is rooted in the new normal. With the support of our global implementation partner ecosystem, we can now deliver a proven, comprehensive commerce solution across all industries, handling the challenges of today and in the future.”
Kalyan Kumar, HCL Chief Technology Officer and Corporate Vice President, highlighted the broader product collaboration:
“The HCL Google Cloud Business Unit is enabling product collaboration across HCL Software and Google Cloud. The launch of HCL Commerce on Google Cloud is the first among a number of planned joint offerings built around application modernisation, data centre and database value unlock.”
Kevin Ichhpurani, Google Cloud Corporate Vice President, emphasised the customer experience angle:
“It is more important than ever for firms spanning all industries to deliver strong, customer-centric eCommerce experiences. We’re proud that Google Cloud infrastructure will power HCL Commerce, helping businesses leverage the elasticity and reliability of Google Cloud and ultimately delivering positive eCommerce experiences for customers around the world.”
Why Anthos Matters for Hybrid E-Commerce Deployments
The planned use of Google’s Anthos platform is a technically significant element of this partnership. Anthos is Google’s managed application platform that lets organisations run containerised workloads consistently across on-premises infrastructure, Google Cloud, and other public clouds. For enterprise retailers with existing on-premises investments — common in the HCL Commerce customer base — Anthos provides a migration path that avoids a hard cutover to public cloud, instead enabling a gradual or permanent hybrid model.
This is particularly relevant for e-commerce platforms that must handle highly variable traffic spikes (such as seasonal peaks) while keeping sensitive transactional data under tighter control where compliance requires it.
Broader Context: Google Cloud’s Partner Expansion Strategy
The HCL announcement was part of a wider pattern of Google Cloud deepening enterprise partnerships in mid-2020. Around the same period, Google Cloud expanded its relationship with Dell Technologies, which included the launch of a joint hybrid cloud storage system capable of handling high-performance workloads of up to 50 petabytes.
That Dell-Google solution was designed for workloads requiring high throughput and low-latency file storage — such as video streaming services supporting 4K content — and allowed movement of demanding workloads in a single filesystem between on-premises Dell infrastructure and Google Cloud.
Kris Day, Dell Vice President of Modern Data Centre for Asia Pacific and Japan, described the strategic intent:
“Our new advancements affirm our belief that cloud is an accelerator for innovation, as well as underpin our go-to-market strategy of bringing the cloud operating model spanning edge, private and public clouds with consistent infrastructure and operations. These Dell Technologies Cloud updates are designed to support our customers across Asia Pacific and Japan who are investing in multi-cloud strategies that include hybrid, public and private cloud environments to meet different needs for a variety of data workloads — mission-critical applications, AI and ML workloads, as well as developer environments.”
Key Takeaways for DevOps and Platform Engineers
- HCL Commerce on Google Cloud signals growing enterprise appetite for fully managed, cloud-native commerce infrastructure rather than self-hosted deployments.
- Anthos as a bridge layer is becoming a recurring pattern for ISVs looking to support hybrid deployments without forking their product for each environment.
- Multi-cloud is a selling point, not just a technical option — vendors are explicitly calling out multi-cloud flexibility as a business requirement, not just an architectural preference.
- Platform partnerships drive go-to-market: Joint business units (like the HCL Google Cloud Business Unit mentioned here) are increasingly the vehicle through which cloud providers and ISVs co-develop and co-sell solutions.