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Evolution of eCommerce platforms
Veröffentlicht 03/11/10 von Peter van Reijmersdal
Interested to know what's happening in the ever changing market of eCommerce platforms ? Read this blog entry and you'll know.
Forrester has just released the latest report called 'B2C eCommerce Platforms, Q4 2010' and it's already obsolete. The market of eCommerce platforms is changing constantly and it seems that the changes are coming faster and faster. This makes it very difficult for merchants to choose the right platform.
In the Forrester report hybris made an interesting move forward and is now one of the 3 leading eCommerce platforms worldwide, or should I say one of the 2 leading platforms as ATG is to be bought by Oracle. This means hybris leads the pack together with IBM. ATG was already overtaken by hybris as specified in the Forrester report and has less momentum than hybris. This is probably one of the reasons for the acquisition by Oracle.
Oracle will have to integrate ATG into their already huge product portfolio, which is becoming more and more complex. What will this mean for existing ATG customers ? Probably even longer release cycles with new functionality, which will give companies like hybris a huge advantage in new leading edge functionality like integrated CMS, mobile- and social commerce, advanced business reporting and more. For Oracle it's a logical acquisition, as their own eCommerce solution in their many different ERP solutions are very limited in functionality and flexibility. Not that the ATG platform will help them with this, agility is further away than ever !
The open-source solution Magento was not evaluated by Forrester, although there was one paragraph where it was mentioned. Forrester thinks companies are underestimating the costs for professional services to set-up, integrate and scale-up solutions like Magento, minimizing the cost advantages of Magento's business model (aka open-source). We have seen customers of Softlution moving away from Magento to solutions like hybris just for this reason, although Softlution thinks Magento is a great solution to start with and proof your online business model for SME companies. As soon as you start growing and need to scale-up, you'll find that Magento cannnot grow with you and you'll need to re-platform.
