Secret Agents! 007's Vesper Cocktail & Commerce Process Orchestration Solutions
Issue №27 - We examine the emergence of Commerce Process Orchestration solutions, while sipping on a batched and frozen Vesper cocktail that Bond would no doubt approve of.
Welcome to another edition of Cocktails & Commerce. In this issue we explore the emergence of Commerce Process Orchestration solutions - the reasons they are needed and the problems they seek to solve. As we look at these new ‘secret agents’ of commerce, we sip along with an iconic, batched and frozen Vesper cocktail that would make Bond proud - exploring the backstory of how the Vesper went from fiction to icon.
Cheers!
Cocktail: 007 Freezer Vesper
The Vesper, also known as the Vesper Martini, was invented by author Ian Fleming for his iconic, fictional British secret agent, James Bond in his first Bond novel, Casino Royale. Fleming had Bond name the drink after his love-interest - and fictional double agent - Vesper Lynd. In the novel, the character explains that she was born ‘on a very stormy evening’, and that her parents named her ‘Vesper’ - Latin for evening. Bond then gives her name to the Martini variation he orders, leaving little ambiguity in how the bartender is to prepare the cocktail: “A dry martini. Three measures of Gordon’s, one of vodka, half a measure of Kina Lillet. Shake it very well until it’s ice-cold, then add a large thin slice of lemon peel.”
‘Vesper’ also refers to the evening hour when Venus first makes its appearance, and it was thus that Fleming was introduced to the idea for the name of his character and the drink. We know this from Flemming’s close friend Ivar Bryce, who later shared the story in his memoir You Only Love Once. During WWII Bryce and Flemming were traveling in Oracabessa, Jamaica (nice place to sit out a war!) when an elderly couple invited them for drinks at their home. When the butler arrived with the drinks, he apparently said, “Vespers are served.” ("What a helpful chap!”)
The success of Fleming’s 007 franchise - and the movies that followed - ensured that “shaken not stirred” entered the lexicon of popular culture, and kicked off a long-lasting debate between mixologists and some of the - ahem - less informed about the proper way to make a martini. But as Sother Teague, the patron-saint of Cocktails & Commerce once told us, “Martinis are like eggs - everyone likes them their way, and they are all right”. While in mixology there is a general rule-of-thumb to always stir a spirit-only cocktail like a Martini, there's a reasonable argument to be made in support of (the now-iconic) shaking of a Vesper - primarily to introduce dilution in this booze wonder so Bond could keep his wits about him.
Fleming took Vodka from the back-bar to suddenly chic.
It is also worth mentioning that when Flemming’s book came out, vodka was still mostly drunk spiked with tomato juice or mixed with ginger beer in mules. Flemming’s Vesper was among the reasons vodka went from an also-ran relegated to the back-bar to something very chic. And as his character Bond grew in popular-culture’s mind, Casino Royale had a few more reads and the Vesper truly entered the mixology sphere.
But in our contemporary times we have Daniel Craig to thank for the Vesper’s reach. His starring role - and no doubt his co-star Eva Green’s as well - in the 2006 movie adaptation of Casino Royale lent the Vesper a huge boost - infused the drink with smarts, sex appeal and an elegant machismo. (God I wish I had the space to tell my Daniel Craig story. It takes place in a ryokan in Kyoto. Funny!)
Given that the drink contains four ounces of liquor, along with an extra half-ounce of Lillet, the drink is functionally a double. The added dilution created from shaking rather than stirring with ice adds the needed dilution to create a more palatable drink. Shaking may have also served a literary purpose - reinforcing Bond as a hard-drinking secret agent who chose to take his drinks both exceedingly strong and shaken until they were so cold that he could not feel the alcohol as it went down.
A word on dilution! Water is an essential ingredient in nearly every cocktail.
The importance of dilution in cocktailing is often overlooked. Using ice and water to get a cocktail to the right level of dilution is as critical as using fresh ingredients and the right proportions. Yet we typically don’t think about it too much.
Maybe we shake the cocktail until the time the shaker is too cold to hold onto, or we have counted to thirty as we stir our cocktail pitcher, but are we really thinking about dilution? Most of the time even the best mixologists are not, and I am often among them. We may even look down on the idea of weakening a drink we make by adding water, but that is a mistake. When we shake or stir a drink we are not simply chilling it, we are diluting it. Shake your next drink with a full tin of ice and look at how much ice is left after you strain it. All that missing ice not still in the tin? That’s in your drink - because it is supposed to be!
Toby Maloney, founder of the esteemed The Violet Hour and author of The Bartender’s Manifesto wrote, “The only rule of cocktails, with no exception, is that there can be no cocktail without water content.” That is undeniably true since technically water is the basis of all spirits, liqueurs, bitters, and juices - but it is also true that water should be considered an ingredient to help balance the cocktail and blend and combine the elements - the bitter, the sweet, the sour, the spirituous (or not) - and to create texture. A shaken cocktail adds water and air - which adds a lot of texture and body to the drink, while a stirred cocktail adds just the water while chilling the drink and typically creates a silky texture.
In Fleming's books, Bond claims that when he’s working he never has more than one drink before dinner - but he clearly likes that one drink to be very large. It’s easy to appreciate such a loophole. But if you want a less boozy drink, you can dial back the volume while keeping the proportions intact.
Batch ahead and chill.
Batching cocktails and mocktails in general is a great entertainment hack - instead of spending all your time making cocktails instead of visiting and catching up, you simply serve and garnish (Wala!). But batching and putting it in the freezer can add another hack - making boozy cocktails silky smooth and “sit like milk”, as the extreme cold takes boozy cocktails like the martini and makes them smooth and silky on the tongue.
The vesper is also a tall cocktail, making it in the freezer has the benefit that you can have as much or as little as you like. Which of course introduces the peril… an ice cold Vesper will be a short walk to the freezer with an on-demand libation at the ready. (Caution 007!)
Bill is a master of the freezer batch, and as such, we present his ‘ideal’ Vesper freezer spec below. That's, “Friend, Bill Friend.”
007 Freezer Vesper Cocktail Spec
Let’s start out with a single serving version you can make on the fly.
Single serving:
3 oz (~ ml) - Dry Navy Strength Gin (Plymouth Navy Strength recommended)
1 oz (~ ml) - Vodka (Kettle One or other high quality vodka recommended)
1/2 oz (~ ml) - Kina Lillet (Kina L'aero D'or Aperitif recommended, alternatives Cocchi Americano BIanco or Lillet Blonde)
Garnish - Lemon twist
The process:
Put all ingredients in a shaker tin and fill with ice (to the top). Shake hard for a good 15 seconds. Strain into a chilled coupe or Martini glass. Twist a large swatch of lemon peel on top of the drink, expressing the oils, and drop it in. (Preparation time: 5 minutes)
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Batched Freezer bottle:
750ml bottle - Dry Navy Strength Gin (Plymouth Navy Strength recommended)
125 ml - Vodka (Kettle One or other high quality vodka recommended)
62.5 ml - Kina Lillet (Kina L'aero D'or Aperitif recommended, alternatives Cocchi Americano BIanco or Lillet Blonde)
188 ml - Filtered or still water
The process:
Start with an empty 750ml or 1 liter bottle - or a half empty 750ml bottle of the gin you are using (you can pour half out into another container or just drink it!). Add the vodka then shake or swirl (close the lid!). Add Kina then shake or swirl again. Add filtered or distilled water and do one last shake or swirl. Cap and put in the freezer - and we recommend labeling the bottle! (Preparation time: 5 minutes, plus 4-6 hours in the freezer.)
When you serve, simply take out of the freezer and pour into a chilled coupe or Martini glass. (Or in a pinch the cap of a thermos or paper cup!) Add a lemon twist, expressing the oils from the lemon peel atop or in your cocktail.
Notes on batching your Freezer Vesper:
If there is any room left in the bottle, go ahead and top off with a tiny bit more vodka or water to minimize air. This should reduce the formation of ice crystals if you happen to forget about the bottle or not drink it soon enough, which is highly unlikely but still ...
Should take about 4-6 hours for the bottle to reach premium ice cold temperature, so we recommend either making your batch the morning of your dinner party, etc, or leave overnight.
The batched cocktail will last nearly indefinitely in the freezer, though some ice may form if the water separates.
Analysis: Commerce Process Orchestration Solutions - The New Secret Agents of Commerce
We all recognize that digital commerce has undergone a fundamental change over the last decade, one that has only accelerated post-pandemic. No longer is digital commerce, or digital experience for that matter, a mere channel or compliment to a business - it is the business. As things have progressed, there is now a need for businesses to move forward from the simple ability to sell a product online to a complex set of digital interactions. Executing these complex interactions - like customer specific pricing or complex configuration - often involves multiple back-end and front-end systems and multiple business processes to execute. Enabling these more complex ways of marketing-to, selling-to, and serving customers digitally - at scale, performantly, in a self-service manner - is challenging for most businesses today, largely due to the legacy technical environments and functional limitations of both the back-end and front-end systems they are working with - and which are difficult to evolve.
Recently, we have been seeing the rise of a new class of solutions that sit between the front-end and back-end and seek to respond to the challenge. We are inclined to call these Commerce Process Orchestration solutions (CPOs). In many ways these new solutions are like the secret agents of digital commerce - hidden in the shadows and making the hard problems go away. (OK, now take a sip of that Vesper!)
Setting the scene for our spy caper.
Let’s start by hopping into the way-back machine and look at the origins of the commerce platform. Legacy commerce platforms originally developed to abstract the back-end from the front-end. ERPs and other business applications that managed core product, customer, and order data and processes could not handle the online, rapidly scaling nature of online business. The customer was not going to wait for the back-end to look up a price, retrieve product information, check inventory, or process an order (which may have been acceptable for a sales or service person working in front of a terminal in the past). Plus, the website could not go down for ‘routine maintenance’ like the back-end often was - online customers expected the site to be up and working and always on. For many retail and direct to consumer businesses, the commerce platform served a critical capability to abstract the back-end and power the online customer experience 24x7x365. Bring the data needed forward, and then push the data needed to process orders, serve customers, and tally the cash register back.
The commerce platform was there to serve the online customer experience up until the order was placed - not be the system of record. These legacy platforms were integrated into the businesses’ back-ends - to pull product data, look up customer data, and to push orders - often with one-way, asynchronous data-flows and ‘point-to-point’ integrations. It did the trick, enabling businesses to sell online and grow their early online experiences. For businesses outside of retail and direct CPG verticals - developing an online business often required loads of customization of these platforms or the need to develop them from the ground up. The same was true for businesses with complex products requiring configuration, complex and customer specific pricing, complex bundles (often including services packages), subscription models, complex promotions, or bespoke products. And any aspect of customer service typically meant moving to a completely different system, with little early integration. Often that is still largely true outside of order tracking, which is simply calling a service provided by a logistics carrier.
As SaaS and today’s API-first commerce solutions developed, they naturally paved many of the same paths with solutions that ran in the cloud, were easier to scale or auto-scale, more performant, required less maintenance, are less costly to support - and have developed to add many essential capabilities to help merchants more effectively drive their digital businesses forward.
And as time has gone on, the footprint of the commerce platform has in many ways shrunk - complimented by a raft of composable commerce solutions that meet specific needs. But those composable solutions still largely hang off the commerce platform - built to support the online experience with a snapshot of the business and pushing much of the rest of the business processes to the back-end - to the ERP (and in many cases multiple ERPs) the entirety of the business really runs on - and the other solutions attached to it such as customer service. In many ways, while composability has benefits, it also introduces another dimension to the challenge of orchestrating more complex experiences and business processes that lay outside the core of shopping and buying simple SKUs.
Meet “SPECTRE” - AKA the ERP with ‘bad intentions’
The ERP at the end of the day is the system of record - and often loads of customizations have had to take place within those applications to support how any given business does business. That in itself has led to major headaches inside - shall we go ahead and say it? - nearly every business that runs one and has an inkling of complexity. For evidence you can simply look at how expensive and challenging any ERP migration is. The challenge does not lay in integrating the ERP (though there is naturally effort there) but in adapting and customizing it to address how each business works - how they price, how they sell, how they fulfill, how they serve, and in some cases how they market. (Today, SAP actively positions that customers should seek a “clean core” - lest they have trouble upgrading to the latest SAP/S4Whatever.)
Solving for the needed complexity within the ERP leads to loads of overlapping spaghetti code in the back-end, often with manual intervention and exceptions still needed inside a host of critical and common business processes. If businesses can manage to hide that from customers and can afford to handle the messy-bits, maybe they can get away with that for awhile - even if it is slow, expensive, and error prone. But increasingly that no longer works.
Businesses must increasingly respond to the digital-first nature of today’s customer experiences. They must facilitate true omnichannel end-to-end experiences. They must evolve their business models and adapt. And they need to do this with efficiency - as productivity and leveraging technology becomes paramount to competitiveness and the bottom-line. All this begs a new approach - and ideally one that works with the incumbent applications and technology such as ERPs and commerce platforms no one really wants to change if they don’t have to - with minimal impact or complex integration.
When all this back-end and front-end customization is added up it becomes like a convoluted bowl of spaghetti with some commerce and digital experience meatballs on top. And while the below may look appetizing, it is no way to run a business.
Enter the new secret agent - Commerce Process Orchestration
A new class of solutions is emerging to solve for these challenges in a new way - some evolving from commerce and some emerging from other enterprise software domains such as iPaaS, process mining, and experience orchestration. These solutions offer a new approach to orchestrating complex and interdependent workflows and processes across multiple systems and offloading workload and at times logic from both the front-end and back-end.
This is enabled through an event-driven architecture and process models that enable multiple processes and systems to engage at the same time, or in a defined sequence. This sits in between the back-end and front-end to enable complex workflows and steps which are in many cases interdependent on systems across the landscape - or include a user or customer. An event-driven architecture provides an advantage - enabling a more responsive, adaptable environment capable of handling complex, real-time interactions. It’s worth noting that event-driven architectures themselves are nothing new - found in everything from how your bank balance is updated to how an environmental sensor triggers the thermostat - and are nothing new to commerce - add-to-cart being one such example - often embedded within a commerce platform.
Commerce Process Orchestration Marketecture
It’s also notable that these event-driven process solutions do not typically require a copy of all the data involved in a process. Instead, they rely on passing relevant event data - or references to the data - versus needing a copy. This allows the system to remain lightweight and efficient, with components accessing only the necessary data in real-time to perform their tasks, often through asynchronous or parallel communication. This simplifies integration to both the front-end and back-end significantly - while improving performance - as systems don’t have to exchange all the data needed to to execute a process.
Use-Cases: The hardest problems sit in the middle - of the tech-stack and business processes
Businesses of all kinds find themselves needing to or wanting to evolve how they do business - to differentiate or become more efficient. A roster of capabilities have become critical as they evolve and grow their increasingly dynamic and complex digital experiences and businesses, including:
Complex, dynamic bundles, incl. at times client specific and bundled pricing - across many distinct products and services which are often fulfilled separately or by third-parties.
Configure-to-quote and complex quote-to-cash. A mainstay of B2B Distribution and Manufacturing, this kind of use-case can also be found in Financial Services, Professional Services, and complex retail such as bespoke or on-demand.
Always in stock promise dates and service - across splits. Doesn’t sound like a big deal until you take a payment for a product you don’t have but want to have a prompt promise date, take payment type, and settle as soon as the product is picked and packed.
Complex promotions - such as tiered or escalating discounts, bundled promotions, behavioral rewards-based promotion, stock-level based promotion, margin optimized promotion, or competitor matching. Cross or omnichannel promotion often also introduces complexity.
Recurring billing and invoicing - including metered monetization - while dealing with end-of-life, replacement, and out-of-stock situations and settlement.
Exception handling and remediation. Pretty sure there is something like this in nearly every B2B or B2C business of any kind, and it gets more acute at scale especially across an increasingly complex supply and fulfillment environment - including marketplace models.
Inventory visibility across a complex supply and fulfillment network. While this is largely the domain of specialized order orchestration and order management solutions, processing orders across a complex network is… a process. We may see order orchestration and process orchestration solutions increasingly overlap - or for process orchestration to mitigate the need for replacement of order management solutions in full - complimenting them and enabling more complex use-cases in combination.
Effective, consistent personalization that crosses multiple service and communication channels (aka: commerce and marketing) has also brought forward complexity that existing systems and technology have struggled to meet. This type of coordinated personalization is blocked by the siloes the applications and data and content required to execute. Marketing use-cases abound here, and I look forward to seeing how coordination of content and offers can be better executed across direct-marketing, sites, apps, and advertising through the use of process engines - ensuring the right content and offers are presented to customers consistently across the experience.
Dealing with multiple back-ends. Often this can occur as businesses acquire, and despite the intention - or business case - of merging the ERP and other back-end systems this is often both costly and complex. Leaving them in place is often a reality, running different parts of the business on different back-ends. That can pose a challenge when trying to combine them into one experience or across one process.
In addition to changing how the business and customer experience works, there is a critical urgency inside most businesses to automate and leverage technology to reduce cost, errors, and time involved in many processes. Most business cases for process orchestration should naturally include the opportunity to take cost out of the business as well as improve the customer experience. That is of course most acute in people-intensive steps and processes, but can also extend to the cost of hosting and running large enterprise applications and technologies - removing the cost of supporting and serving the front-end experiences and applications. And in our era of AI, the pressure to find productivity gains is even more amplified.
The case for Commerce-specific Process Orchestration
Lets’ face it, delivering a commerce experience is complex and involves its own ecosystem of solutions. Specialization in use-cases common to commerce (see above graphic) will be important - just as finance and plant operations will have their specific needs. Gartner has predicted a consolidation of technologies that triangulate around similar challenges in enterprise software more broadly that combine autonomous process orchestration, low-code development, cognitive capabilities powered by AI, event-driven triggers, and rich user interfaces that solve for a raft of enterprise automation and orchestration ills. They are describing this domain as business orchestration and automation technologies (BOAT) and suggesting a consolidation across Robotic Process Automation (RPA), Business Process Automation (BPA) and cloud integration platforms (iPaaS). (Enough acronyms yet?!)
As process orchestration develops as a market we may yet see that develop, but at this point we see that as aspirational. What we want to see is a set of solutions emerge that specialize in solving for the hard problems of commerce - the “commerce verbs” like configure, price, subscribe, reorder, exchange, pay-later, reserve, try-on or trial, bundle, split, customize, install, authorize, upgrade, activate, or split.
This thriller is yet to be fully written
Today, as businesses fully adapt to our digital era and aim to evolve how they do business - and all the channels they want to do that business across - they can benefit from Commerce Process Orchestration as they go about changing and adapting existing business processes inside a rigid technical environment and the limitations of their existing systems. We are very likely see a host of capabilities within these process orchestration solutions mature over the coming years, including:
Leveraging AI to create and design orchestration of processes - or design new processes - by generating and suggesting workflows, rules and actions based on business goals.
Automate complex tasks that have always required humans to be involved to judge and understand - such as document and information understanding and analysis, sentiment analysis, fraud detection and decision making.
Optimize processes through testing and machine-learning, by learning from feedback and outcomes, and adjusting the process logic and parameters accordingly.
Be able to explain themselves and take natural language input to enable humans to be engaged in and steer the orchestration with little technical knowledge. Alongside this will be low-code/no-code user-interfaces.
And while it is early, we are excited to see this new category of solution emerge and are anxious to see it develop. Clarity of use-cases, maturation of the technologies, and defensibility of these solutions will be critical for this market to develop. But as the enterprise commerce platform market has matured and to some degree stagnated, this next-generation of solutions offers a glimpse into how both composability within commerce will evolve and offer added intelligence, autonomy and adaptability to complex commerce process execution and management. We believe this is an interesting space to watch, and a meaningful addition to the commerce tech landscape.
Consider this article as a conversation starter, we’re interested in what you think.
Thank you for reading, cheers!
Notes:
For more on how the complexity and challenges explored above might impact commerce systems integrators and consultancies, I recommend looking at our last issue of Cocktails & Commerce.
If you are interested in looking into some of these solutions yourself - as a potential client or partner - I suggest you get in touch with Emporix, Ooctoo, and Viax to learn more. All of these companies are in many ways early in their journeys, but are already solving complex process challenges across many clients - each in a somewhat unique way.
If you are looking for Brian online, you can find him here, here, and here. And find Bill here and here.
Be well, drink well, and here is to good business! Cheers! - Brian
Cocktails & Commerce™ is a wholly owned subsidiary of StrategyēM, LLC.
Vesper is a favorite! And I never knew about the possibility of a frozen version. Thanks Brian. Always enjoy your posts!