Tacit Knowledge

Tacit Knowledge is a provider of digital commerce consultancy services for retail and e-commerce organizations. The company provides web development, integration, content management, and application support for brands. Tacit Knowledge's flagship service, ncommerce, combines technology from retail technology companies for a stable and scalable platform intended to be easy to deploy for retailers.

The company was founded in 2002 by Chris Andrasick, Manish Bardolia, and Scott Askew. Headquartered in London, the company has offices in the United States, Mexico, and Moldova. In June 2021, Tacit Knowledge was acquired by Grid Dynamics. The transaction's terms were not disclosed. Tacit Knowledge has worked with brands including Blount International, FitFlop, Office Depot, Simpson Strong-Tie, Mulberry, Matchefashion, Sofology, Beaverbrooks, Solstice Sunglasses, and Wiggle, to help digitize and modernize their online and in-store retail transactions.

Tacit Knowledge has strategic alliances with various commerce platforms to help deliver their services and solutions to their clients. These include partnerships with commerce platform providers SAP, Salesforce, and Commercetools; payment management providers CyberSource and adyen; e-commerce search provider Algolia; order management company FluentCommerce; digital content management providers Adobe and Amplience; cloud platform providers Google Cloud Platform and Fastly; marketplace platform Mirakl; digital intelligence provider New Relic; customer loyalty provider Annex Cloud; and personalization provider SailThru.

Tacit Knowledge offers software consulting for retail brands. This includes their Site Stabilization and Performance Tuning services. The Site Stabilization is a service for troubleshooting live environments that are experiencing stability issues under load, and usually the service is used during holidays or after major software releases.

The Performance Tuning service is used in the context of certifying an environment prior to a popular launch or as a preparedness initiative. The service includes optimizing software and supporting platforms for retailers and has been used, according to Tacit Knowledge, as part of a transformational effort or a component of solving problematic software. As well, the company offers a system evaluation service used in planning efforts to select technologies and design new solutions, and during development to evaluate third-party software deliveries, identify compliance issues, and provide insights into building and operating high-scale systems.

Tacit Knowledge offers e-commerce consulting as part of the company's consulting services. This includes a service focus on end-to-end support to ensure project success, including planning and executing project discovery phases, training clients on their new software, and developing skills in a workforce to continue developing a project. As part of the services, Tacit Knowledge will design and review software and packaged software products to incorporate them into a larger system, with processes such as code review and solution design, to ensure the larger software system works as intended. This can include prototyping and testing key design assumptions for a client.

Digital commerce is, according to Tacit Knowledge, the company's primary focus, with the company's international experience extending to implementations within mobile commerce, social commerce, and high-scale commerce. The services include the installation, customization, and integration of solutions such as SAP Hybris, Adobe Experience Manager, and Salesforce Commerce Cloud.

As well, as part of these services, Tacit Knowledge offers tools designed to test and monitor e-commerce platforms, including testing frameworks and software that removes the error-prone steps commonplace with building and maintaining solutions. The company has developed innovations in mobile commerce and the creation of high capacity solutions.

Tacit Knowledge's Peak Ready Performance is a proprietary approach developed for site performance analysis and remediation for the development of resilient and durable e-commerce applications. This is, in part, accomplished by Tacit Knowledge's anticipation and circumvention of common stability and performance problems found in e-commerce sites.

The approach of Peak Ready Performance is to identify all wait points unique to a particular online store, running specific programs to stress out the system, including slow and stop load tests while monitoring the site's behavior and modifying the software so it can become resilient under these conditions.

Tacit Knowledge's managed services are intended to give digital commerce businesses with key information surfaced to a dashboard built for merchants. The support focuses on platforms like SAP Hybris and Adobe Experience Manager, which can allow users to avoid manual steps and human-error through the automation and provisioning of the deployments. The managed services offered by Tacit Knowledge are organized into two facets, including site operations, which ensure site availability and performance, and business operations, which provide end-user support for commerce tooling.

Tacit Knowledge's ncommerce solution is built to allow small and medium size brands and retailers to use the features, flexibility, and scalability of enterprise-class e-commerce platform, such as SAP Commerce Cloud. Ncommerce allows these users to use the software in their solutions at half the typical cost of the implementation.

Tacit Knowledge further offers pre-integrations of VISA payment gateway, fraud management, tax calculation, tokenization, and Fastly CDN in the software. They offer automated testing framework and management of the software platform for clients. And Tacit Knowledge offers customization, third-party integrations, and end-user training and support to help a company integrate the ncommerce solution.