Magento makes it into the 2017 Magic Quadrant
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Magento makes it into the 2017 Magic Quadrant


Magento makes an appearance in the 2017 Digital Commerce Gartner Magic Quadrant.  This is great news for them and some great validation by the industry that Magento is ready to take on the Enterprise of eCommerce.  It’s come a long way from the first version I used for one of my business ventures almost nine years ago. The report is not without some critical views I will address later.

Some of it’s great strengths are:

  • Huge community of 3 rd party extension providers
  • Seasoned and very extension developer community
  • A very large install base
  • Ability to customize and extend the solution

Some things Magento needs to work on:

  • Still has essentially the same technical architecture in version 2 as before, meaning it uses the same EAV db, caches, and indexes as before, but the core PHP makes a huge shift to dependency inection.  This means you need a great hosting provider that can understand how to tune it and make is sing (we partner with eBound host, they rock)
  • They need to create a development tool set to make easier for developers to work with (they just released Magento dev box docker version Yeah!!) We pioneered a vagrant approach to solve this.
  • The huge amount of extensions also creates the inevitable situation of code quality and in spite of the fact the architecture is really really similar, the core code in Magento 2 requires total refactoring of vendors extension code.  It’s been over a year since Magento 2 is out this seems to.

What no Node.js based eCommerce Solution?

I think one of the biggest gaps I noticed in this report is that not one of the 21 vendors is a full stack javascript solution.  Web development and e-Commerce go hand in hand and one of the biggest trends in technology today is the full stack development. So much so that Stanfords CS 101 is now JavaScript based.

This surely is going to change soon.  Solutions such as Reaction Commerce are picking up steam, and could one day give Magento a run for its money.  Because surely a node.js system will be blazingly fast without any Caches or Indexes that Magento needs to use, and probably much easier to develop too.  Though they are clearly not there yet, it’s definitely time to take a good look for a rising star in JavaScript space.

The other thing is that no matter what in every Gartner Report is seems the Oracle, IBM and SAP seem to be stuck there at the top.  Though their solutions have some a great history, they often are aging without lots of innovation, Oracle solution for example has been largely the same since it was first released by ATG.  They are making a huge push toward the cloud version but there is still some growing pains there.  I am also not sure that I would want my eCommerce solution on a cloud based system. I would pick cloud solutions for some smaller businesses but for larger ones that typically gravitate to building on a platform from oracle that I could totally extend. Magento by the way fits in quite nicely for that, so enterprises clients should really give it a good looking into.

The other thing that you just don’t get out of a report like this is the enormous amount of 3rd party extensions really gives a Magento a huge huge differentiation.  If you wanted to do some of the same things you can find in these extension in Oracle Commerce for example its got to be totally customized or omitted.

Magento is certainly making its case for Enterprise clients, and still our primary go to solution for eCommerce systems.

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