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Alumio at Hyvä Camp Kiel: The future of AI, e-commerce, integrations
As a solution that builds on the solid foundation of Magento 2, Hyvä has emerged as a fast-growing name in the world of e-commerce. Hyvä Camp Kiel (hosted by Splendid Internet) was a purpose-built summit where they could gather the Hyvä community and partner network to unveil their new feature stack and co‑define what comes next in the world of e-commerce,
This involved great presentations by the participating industry experts on a range of topics, which included low‑code Magento integrations, real‑user performance monitoring, simplifying B2B commerce, the etracker Consent Benchmark Study 2025, universal connector standards, and more. In that collaborative setting, Ray Bogman took the stage to exhibit how the Alumio integration platform, powered by the emerging MCP (Model Context Protocol) standard for AI integrations, can weave all these conversations into a single, seamless integration strategy.
This was followed by a hackathon, where Ray joined a small team of fellow experts to work on creating an idea where the MCP protocol could be used to create guest orders in Hyvä Commerce, Magento, and Adobe Commerce. To learn from his experience, we interviewed Ray Bogman about his experience of bringing Alumio (as Head of Innovation) to Hyvä Camp Kiel 2025.
Let’s dive into what he had to share…
What is Hyvä and Hyvä Commerce?
“… Hyvä first emerged as a lightweight, low-maintenance Magento theme that focused on high-performance and good UX. Over time, this grew into Hyva Checkout for Magento, a tool that improves conversion rates and AOV. And this trajectory eventually led to the development of Hyvä Commerce, a full-fledged e-commerce solution. It’s designed to maximize the scalability of the Magento Open-Source platform while reducing complexity for e-commerce teams.
Hyvä Commerce is designed to fill in the feature gap in the Adobe Commerce solution with new features such as a modern admin panel, enhanced CMS capabilities, and much more. As of now, Hyvä is live on 5,500+ stores and growing fast with a vibrant ecosystem of 850+ agencies, 1,600+ compatible extensions, and a community of 6,000+ developers on Slack and 8,000+ on Gitlab.
We’re also happy to share that Hyvä Commerce is now live on the Alumio integration marketplace. This means the Alumio platform can be used to integrate Hyvä Commerce with any tech stack →.”
What did Alumio present at Hyvä Camp Kiel?
“As Head of Innovation at Alumio, Ray Bogman presented ideas on the topic “MCP Meets iPaaS: The Integration Power Couple You Didn’t Know You Needed” at Hyvä Camp Kiel. He opened by defining the two pillars of his topic:
- MCP (Model Context Protocol): An open standard from Anthropic (creators of Claude AI) that lets any AI model connect directly to your applications—requesting and updating data without custom connectors or bespoke integration.
- Alumio iPaaS (Integration Platform as a Service): A cloud-native, API-driven orchestration layer that lets you visually design, monitor, and manage data flows across all your systems.
In a landscape where AI capabilities are outpacing traditional application integrations, Ray showed how the MCP (Model Context Protocol) standard offers a shortcut to building robust AI‑powered connections and automations. Pairing it with a mature iPaaS like Alumio unlocks:
- Adaptive intelligence + orchestration
MCP provides a context‑aware decision layer that determines which data or actions are required, while the iPaaS acts as the orchestration layer to connect, transform, and route that data across systems at scale. - Real‑time, personalized automation
AI agents leverage MCP to assess live context (e.g., customer segment, location, compliance rules) and invoke the appropriate iPaaS workflows, enabling integrations to react dynamically rather than on fixed schedules. - Future‑proof & scalable
As you introduce new AI tools or backend services, simply layer in the corresponding MCP adapters and iPaaS connectors without rewriting core workflows, ensuring rapid innovation with built‑in governance and error handling
Ray also walked attendees through real‑world scenarios, like enriching cart recommendations with LLM‑driven insights or automating multi‑channel order flows. This demonstrated how the iPaaS and MCP protocol combined help bridge gaps between AI and application endpoints.
What did the hackathon at Hyvä Camp Kiel involve?
The free-form hackathon at Hyvä Camp Kiel divided the participants into teams, where they had to work on developing and delivering a predefined solution to solve a tech problem. The topics that were suggested for the hackathon were as follows:
- Making a good Headless CMS
- No more CSP domain whitelisting
- Getting rid of the Hyvä Reset Theme
- Proxying ViewModels
- Varnish Optimization
- HyväCommerce Localizations
- Building a migration tool from Pagebuilder to Hyvä CMS
However, there was one topic that was written on the hackathon agenda that was particularly relevant for Ray and Alumio. It involved creating a prototype for creating guest orders in an e-commerce platform like Hyvä Commerce using MCP.
Rapid prototyping with MCP at the hackathon
To deliver a solution for his chosen hackathon challenge, Ray teamed up with a fellow developer, a CTO, and a few eager learners to build the MCP-focused prototype. After sharing awareness and context on MCP, Ray recommended building their MCP prototype with the open-source Bold Commerce library instead.
By leveraging Bold Commerce’s prebuilt components for product lookups and order creation, they could avoid building things from scratch and could focus on wiring up MCP calls directly. Using Claude AI, connecting it to the MCP server, they could write a simple prompt to create and place dummy orders in the example of a live shop. This reuse of a battle‑tested library meant they had a fully functioning demo, capable of placing dummy orders via MCP, ready by the end of the day.
Want to learn more about the MCP protocol and how it simplifies AI connectivity? Read our full interview with Ray Bogman on MCP →
What were some fun highlights from Hyvä Camp Kiel?
“Hyvä Camp Kiel wasn’t just sitting in conference rooms. Apart from the exciting hackathon and conference sessions, there were some great networking opportunities with a cocktail reception, home-cooked meals by our hosts—Splendid Internet, and a beach outing with windsurfing and stand-up paddling. These moments fostered meaningful connections, where interesting ideas and insightful feedback were shared.
Another highlight was demo’ing the Alumio integration platform’s visual workflow builder on a big screen—dragging in prebuilt connectors, mapping fields in seconds, and showing how non‑technical users can assemble and monitor complex data flows without writing a single line of code. C-level participants, especially, appreciated that Alumio makes integrations simple and accessible for everyone. This inclusive approach not only accelerates onboarding, but also builds trust with businesses where long‑term relationships and transparency are everything.”
Looking forward: Smart integrations in e‑commerce
Looking back, Hyvä Camp Kiel was a reminder that the best innovations happen when you bring diverse minds together, from developers to business leaders. For Alumio, the real takeaway was seeing how quickly ideas around MCP and iPaaS can turn into working demos, and how much value non‑technical stakeholders find in visual, config‑first, no‑code workflows.
The hackathon prototype Ray built with his team of Hyvä Camp Kiel participants, highlighted how community collaboration can uncover both creative possibilities and real‑world improvement areas. This also underscores the importance of listening to partner feedback throughout the development cycle. We’re excited to carry these lessons forward at Alumio, refining how our platform helps more teams and businesses integrate applications, AI, and the latest tools in a fast, scalable, and future-proof way.
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