Beyond the Platform — Building Hybrid Architectures with Commercial CMS, eCommerce, and Custom Middleware

Most mid-to-large enterprises run on a commercial CMS (Adobe Experience Manager, Sitecore) and an eCommerce platform (Salesforce Commerce Cloud, SAP Commerce, Magento, Shopify Plus) — and most of them eventually hit the same wall: the platform does 80% of what's needed, but the remaining 20% (custom workflows, real-time data, user-generated content, cross-system orchestration) doesn't fit the vendor's roadmap. This three-lecture series walks through the reference architecture, integration patterns, and pragmatic trade-offs for extending commercial platforms with custom middleware microservices — without ending up with an unmaintainable spaghetti of point-to-point integrations. Drawn from real Solution Architect engagements, not vendor marketing decks. Suitable for senior engineers, tech leads, and architects evaluating or already running hybrid stacks.