Magento is Moving Fast in 2017

Magento is moving fast and not only looking to keep but also to grow their market share in 2017. Accorin solution consultants attended the annual sales kickoff meeting hosted by Magento in L.A. last week and throughout the long day it became very apparent that Magento is very serious and playing to win in the competitive e-commerce software space. Here are some encouraging insights about where Magento seems to be emphasizing efforts (without of course giving away anything that might be construed as “confidential”). As a certified Solution Partner Acorin obviously is excited to support Magento’s efforts this year!

Magento 2.X (now 2.1)  

Magento 2.X is Ready. The marketplace already has over 150 approved extensions and the 2.x platform is much more stable than in the first year after launch. Magento is encouraging merchants and solution partners to keep migrating sites to 2.X from 1.x. The end of 1.X support is looming and is not only 22 months away (November 2018). To learn more about Magento 2 and the benefits of upgrading see: https://magento.com/products/enterprise-edition

2.X Cloud

The Cloud version of Magento is not a Shopify or Volusion knock off for those of you new to Magento or e-commerce. It’s a full Enterprise of Magento version run on top of a sophisticated tech stack that can be completely outsourced a.k.a it’s really “PaaS” no “SaaS” and so especially with an incoming array of new B2B features we see Magento preparing to do battle with Hybris – especially as Hybris starts to move “downstream” with offerings that attract smaller customers than it has in the past. For a quick primer on “Cloud” please see: https://magento.com/products/enterprise-cloud-edition.

Much More than a Great Shopping Cart: Magento is Getting Deeper into E-commerce Ops and BI

Magento is clearly moving to be closer to a one stop e-commerce software company if there ever will truly be one. Business Intelligence, Data Management, Analytics, CMS (user experience content support)and Order Management are all important areas of emphasis for Magento and they are extending the platform to focus on those areas of e-commerce ops which it knows are critical for merchant success in e-commerce. One publicly available piece of evidence supporting this is the recent acquisition of RJ Metrics: “Magento acquired RJMetrics, a cloud-based analytics platform tuned for digital commerce business intelligence. In addition to the valuable analytics extensions already built for Magento, the Magento core platform will now include a powerful native solution enabling merchants to better understand and optimize their commerce business based on actionable data and insights into customers, merchandising, channels, and more.” We got the impression that the RJ acquisition was the tip of the iceberg as Magento moves in this exciting direction. (You can read the announcment here: https://magento.com/press-room/press-releases/magento-commerce-acquires-rjmetrics).

Magento will Continue to Market and Support its Competitive Position

Magento is the most popular e-commerce platform in the world. It is going to continue to leverage and solidify its position with sales and marketing efforts that support why Magento is already winning:

• It’s Global Ready
• It has a growing multiproduct portfolio
• Its Broad and has clients across 20+ verticals and 1000+ solution partners
• It’s the most flexible platform so it is best positioned to support a highly innovative e-commerce economy
• Increasingly Rapid TIme to Market:  50% within 3 months vs typical 6-12 months
• Low Total Cost of Ownership (½ of Demandware, and significantly lower than Hybris, Oracle and IBM)

B2B is Key for Magento

Magento will continue to roll-out key CORE features for B2B merchants supporting what it knows is a different market that still expects “B2C like experiences.” The marketplace of B2B extensions is growing rapidly and given Magento’s new focus on extension quality and security it believes the features exist to compete with nd beat and B2B-focused competitor.  Magento has now a live B2B site that developers helping their B2B clients can utilize and share / show many of the core B2B features and extensions.

The Bottom Line

Finally, it was quite notable that Magento introduced new executive leadership for almost all of these core areas of growth emphasis in 2017. The Bottom Line? Magento is aggressively looking to grow its 2.x, cloud and B2B offerings this year and it’s not going to stop there as its R&D continues on a very rapid pace.