Magento, the leading open-source e-commerce platform, has just notched a new honor: Forrester Research has named it an "Emerging Player to Watch" in its Forrester Wave: B2C eCommerce Platforms, Q1 2009 report.
This is an exceptional testament to the growing momentum of Magento. Varien's Magento is the only open-source e-commerce platform named in the report, alongside industry leaders IBM and ATG.
But it's not what Varien has done with Magento that Forrester deems exciting. Rather, it is Magento's momentum, and implicit room to grow, that Forrester calls this out in its report:
Magento is a very exciting open-source e-commerce solution and...is typically delivered at the enterprise level through the professional services of the company that developed and launched the product, Varien....Enterprise-level e-commerce organizations should view Magento as an opportunity to launch small-scale side projects and experiments, but for larger companies with limited e-commerce needs, it may prove to be a very attractive solution.
Product maturity, proof of the product's scalability, and further development of SIs and Varien's own professional services may place Magento as an enterprise-class solution in the future.
This is precisely where most successful open-source products start: departmental deployments in the enterprise with more extensive applicability in the small-to-midsize enterprise market. However, as with Hyperic, MindTouch, and other open-source offerings, Magento is unlikely to reserve itself for these more limited deployments.
Forrester forecasts online retailers to upgrade their platforms over the next two years, and I suspect that Magento will increasingly get the nod as online retailers seek the flexibility, cost profile, and embeddability that an open-source solution like Magento can provide.
Follow me on Twitter at mjasay.
A friend pointed me to news that Magento, a leading open-source commerce platform, has cracked 500,000 downloads, not to mention its 44,000 community members that have translated the project into over 60 languages. That is progress that money can't buy, or at least not cheaply.
But that's only half the story. It has been said that "imitation is the sincerest form of flattery," and the real story behind Magento's success is that it's breeding copycats. Several proprietary competitors, like Oxid eShop, are throwing in the towel and open sourcing their code, too.
The Magento project, founded by Varien in 2001, hasn't been around long, but it's already disrupting the e-commerce market. It's also getting attention from The Wall Street Journal, among others.
Earlier this year I talked up Varien/Magento as a company and project to watch. I was speculating at that time, but today its success seems relatively sure. It's now a question of "how big?" for Magento, not "will it take off?"
- prev
- 1
- next
