Consider the humble brand website. One has recipes. Another sells directly to consumers. A third serves business buyers. Now imagine being responsible for more than 250 of them. At Kraft Heinz, this was the territory Infosys Equinox entered: a sprawling digital estate in which launching another site could become an exercise in coordination. In 2021, Kraft Heinz reported that the platform powered its global brand sites and helped it launch new ones in three to five days. The interesting achievement was making repetition useful.
- Separate the storefront from the machinery that sells.
- Reuse commerce services across brands and channels.
- Pair the software with people who can integrate and operate it.
Equinox is Infosys’s enterprise commerce platform, descended from a company called Skava. It handles the less photogenic side of shopping: catalogs, prices, carts, inventory, orders and customer information. Its customers include businesses whose selling arrangements are complicated enough that a handsome website barely begins to solve the problem.
A tiny screen, an oversized problem
Skava began in 2002, when Arish Ali and Sudha K. Varadarajan were betting on mobile before the iPhone existed. The first difficulty was timing. Handsets differed, distribution was fragmented, and the market was hard to monetize. Mobile games and apps brought in business while the larger opportunity remained elusive. Ali later said the company reached its acquisition without outside funding.
Around 2008, the founders saw retailers’ customers adopting smartphones faster than retailers could accommodate them. Existing commerce systems had been designed around desktop pages. The change in consumer behavior exposed a very specific gap: the shopping machinery might still work, but the screen through which people reached it had changed.
The company focused on mobile commerce. In 2015, Infosys acquired Skava in a deal with aggregate consideration of $120 million, including retention and deferred components. Varadarajan later described anticipating consolidation and wanting a larger partner. Infosys gained technology; Skava gained access to enterprise clients. The Equinox name arrived in September 2021, after the Skava business had been transferred into Infosys.
Buy the engine by the part
The platform’s organizing idea is separation. A cart is a service. Pricing is another. The storefront asks those services for information through software interfaces. A mobile app, a website and an in-store screen can therefore use the same underlying commerce functions while presenting different experiences.
Illustrative view of headless commerce
That is the practical meaning of “headless.” Equinox adds independently deployable microservices and calls its architecture MACH-X: microservices, API-first, cloud-native, headless and extensible. The letters matter less than the consequence. A retailer can replace a troublesome function in stages, keeping useful systems connected while the migration proceeds.
Equinox Studio addresses a different bottleneck: who gets to change the experience. Its visual editing tools let business users shape storefronts with less engineering involvement. Blueprints establish what headquarters controls and what individual brands or regions can change. Across a large portfolio, the ability to propagate one decision may matter as much as the ability to design one page.
The distinction is organizational as well as technical. A shared blueprint gives a central team a repeatable starting point, while local teams retain room for their markets. The buyer’s task is to decide those boundaries before rollout. Otherwise, a flexible editor can reproduce the same disagreements that once happened through a developer ticket.
“We are able to launch new brand sites in as little as 3 to 5 days.”Eric Nelson · Kraft Heinz · 2021
The customer has an affiliate
Nu Skin reveals another kind of complexity. The beauty and wellness business serves consumers and the affiliates who build businesses around them. A purchase has to fit relationships among all three parties. Different markets and legacy systems add more moving parts. A generic shopping cart can look perfectly adequate until those relationships arrive.
Infosys announced its Nu Skin collaboration in April 2022. In later discussions, Nu Skin technology leaders emphasized extending the platform without sacrificing scalability. By 2025, Infosys had opened a dedicated digital innovation center for Nu Skin in Coimbatore, with work spanning Equinox rollout, application support, infrastructure and security. The storefront had an organization behind it.
For a manufacturer selling to businesses, the useful features may be negotiated prices, purchasing approvals and recurring orders. For a consumer brand, they may be loyalty, subscriptions or collecting an online order in a store. Equinox supports both sets of requirements. Its expertise sits in connecting those selling rules to the systems that already run an enterprise.
The price of joining the pieces
This is where Equinox fits in the market. Enterprises can consider alternatives such as commercetools, Salesforce Commerce Cloud, SAP Commerce Cloud or Adobe Commerce. Equinox’s proposition combines modular software with Infosys’s integration and operating services. The parent also implements other commerce platforms, including commercetools. Choosing a delivery partner and choosing its software are related decisions worth examining separately.
The commercial model is commerce-as-a-service, with enterprise engagements that can include implementation and ongoing operations. Buyers should assess the combined cost of platform, integration, migration and support. The historical $120 million price tag bought Skava; it says nothing about what a retailer’s deployment should cost.
There is a useful lesson here even for a business that never buys Equinox. Identify one delay, measure it, and test whether changing one component removes it. Modularity still leaves someone responsible for interfaces, testing and data. For a small merchant with straightforward needs, that operating burden may outweigh the flexibility. This is an architectural trade-off, not a promise that more pieces make every business faster.
The next shopper may speak
In September 2026, Equinox’s developer portal documented the first production-capable Agentic Commerce Interface. It connects conversational agents with commerce systems, including Shopify, Salesforce and Equinox. The release covers discovery, carts, orders, subscriptions and support. Certain actions require verified identity; placing an order requires an explicit affirmative reply after checkout intent.
Those rules are revealing. Moving shopping into a conversation still requires the ordinary disciplines of commerce: accurate availability, current prices and permission to buy. The interface changes; the transaction remains stubbornly concrete. Equinox’s long-running wager is that separating those two things makes the next change easier to absorb. From the tiny phone screen to the talking assistant, the useful question remains: what needs to change this time?