John Beechen

We all know that it’s the people behind a technology that make the whole difference. So, why not meet the people behind HCL Commerce Cloud who make a great difference every single day to make sure our customers have the best solution at hand and that we cater for future needs today.

Who are they – and what do they do when they don’t work?

Maja Bondensgaard, Associate Director of Marketing, set out to talk to some of them. Spread all over the world, these cool people pick up on the newest trends and features every day to keep our solutions on par with the latest trends for the sake of our customers.

This time: Meet John Beechen, HCL Commerce Product Manager, who has lived in 3 countries and visited 100+ other countries and who says visiting other cultures is addictive to him.

Name and title:

John Beechen – HCL Commerce Product Manager

Tell us a little about yourself:

I’m from Australia but have lived in the USA most of my adult life. I lived in Paris for two years but can’t really speak French. When not working I race motorcycles, bikes – anything with 2 wheels.

Now, tell us something we would never have guessed about you 😊

It's my first, and recently completed a full sleeve tattoo. I’m still practicing at this thing called life. I like EDM music and Chihuahuas (I have 2). I have no children of my own but enjoy hanging out with other peoples.

What’s your best HCL Commerce hack?

Dark code features while you are developing customizations with toggle switches. Then you can do frequent DevOps releases but still work on new features that span releases.

What’s the HCL Commerce trend you are following most enthusiastically at the moment?

I’m interested in composable micro services, or as Gartner is referring to them as "packaged business services" as this trend has emerged with the HCL Commerce ecosystem as the modern way to do HCL Commerce systems. HCL inherited a largely monolithic system from IBM and it's our intention to modularize it in line with these principles, but without the high cost of ownership that integrating a bunch of different products together involves. There's a lot we can do to allow independent deployment and customization of individual aspects of HCL Commerce for our clients, and also accelerate our roadmap and release schedule. We're in the midst of working on this now so I’m highly interested in it. :)

If you could only implement one thing in the next HCL Commerce release, what would it be?

Packaged Business Services – decomposition of the monolith into discrete modules.

What’s the coolest or craziest thing you have helped a customer with?

Help finding their hotel after a long dinner

What did I forget to ask you?

What my Byers Briggs personality type is (its INTJ). How many countries I’ve been to (its 100+ - visiting other places and other cultures is addictive to me).
Which one was the most enjoyable/exotic (it’s a tie between Togo and Mali – Africa is general is as close to the root of humanity as we can get I think).
What my soul food is (its Australian meat pies).
The best meal I’ve ever experienced (a small restaurant in the hills above Positano in Italy with no menu but eat until you can’t anymore).
My favorite TV character (Anthony Bourdain – as real as life gets)