Magento Enterprise Cloud Edition

One of the big announcements at the Magento Imagine conference this April was the unveiling of Magento Enterprise Cloud Edition. The result is the execution of a forward looking strategy by Magento, since its departure from eBay, by swiftly assembling 3rd parties such as Fastly, New Relic, Blackfire.io and Platform.sh, a PHP PaaS running on AWS.

We at Elastera think that it’s good that Magento is recognising the value of cloud for e-commerce and the benefits for online retailers.

We don’t yet have a lot of details about their offering, but we do know it will only be available to customers using Magento 2 Enterprise Edition. Although Magento mentioned it will be available from 1st May 2016, we heard through the grapevine that only a few selected agencies will have access to their new Cloud solution. It makes perfect sense. This is not about releasing a new platform feature, but running a mission critical cloud platform, that demands an exceptional level of pro-activeness, support, technical operation skills and some track record.

The post “Online Retailers deserve better! What you should know about how e-commerce is evolving” describes the hypothesis for a new segment in the e-commerce market, envisaged by Elastera in 2013, when we started. Magento has clearly endorsed and embraced the same vision, and I think this will help driving the type of innovation that Online Retailers deserve.

Here is a summary of the above post explaining why this is a new and very important segment within the e-commerce market for Online Retailers.

Until recently Online Retailers had to choose between SaaS based solution or go down the Do It Yourself path (DIY), that means using an e-commerce platform such as ATG, Websphere, Hybris, Magento etc… build their site, manage third party integrations, hosting, performance, security, scalability etc… They would never be completely happy with their choice, because each pose a compromise.

The Negatives:

with SaaS retailers are renting a platform, which will inevitably pose constraints.

A DIY solution comes with a hefty tax on managing the whole complexity.

The positives:

SaaS makes it easy by removing complexity, while providing low and predictable Total Cost of Ownership (TCO).

The DIY solution provides ownership of the e-commerce platform and the freedom to customise it to create the best customer experience.

The solution to that problem is the Best of Both

because building a great e-commerce site is half the battle, running the site so that it is always Up and running Fast is the other half.

We do agree with Mark Lavelle that this is the start of the post SaaS era; however:

• SaaS will always have a place and be a valuable option
• the “Best of Both” is not a replacement for SaaS, but a valuable and credible alternative
• this isn’t new, in the Content Management System space this shift happened almost a decade ago, with players such as Acquia, WP Engine etc…

Magento 2 is a great, modern e-commerce framework, and we’ve loved working with Inviqa (formerly Session Digital) to deliver two of the very first Magento 2 EE sites. We also understand that it is not practical for every merchant to swiftly migrate from Magento 1 to Magento 2, or upgrade from Community Edition, but they can all benefit from a Cloud platform with the same level of uptime, performance, scalability and security previously only available in the enterprise.

We deeply care to make our clients successful. Today some of our clients run their store on Magento 1, some on Magento 2, some on Community Edition, some others on Enterprise Edition. What they have in common is:

• Ambition
• Growth
• Confidence

this is why they choose Elastera.

So, whether you’re on Magento 1 or Magento 2, Community or Enterprise edition, Elastera helps you unlock the value of cloud e-commerce today and continuously evolve the highly tuned machine to get you ready for the future, whatever it might bring.

Get in touch with Elastera

“The high performing retailers’ best kept secret.”

Originally published at www.elastera.com on April 20, 2016.