Levementum's Blog: "The Open Source Pragmatist" » magento

CRM Matters for Successful eCommerce Merchants

Derek Jacobson — Thu, 17 May 2012 23:26:41 +0000

Many of us are just old enough to remember the UPS commercial about the company that launched their new online store. The handful of entrepreneurs cheered as they saw the first orders come in. When the orders picked up and number more than 100, they screamed. Then 1000 orders…unbelievable. Then, as the numbers continued to grow, the mood became somber? Now what do they do?

That same scenario applies equally today. You’ve built your new Magento eCommerce site. It’s branded to reflect your company image, SEO is effectively in place and you’re getting great visibility and traffic. Orders are coming in, you’re getting paid. But what happens when the calls start coming for support? How will you manage customer requests that can’t be managed in 5 minutes or less and require follow up? What about return requests? What if the caller is a reseller who has special terms and price lists that the call center agent needs to know about when they answer?

These are all key needs that products like SugarCRM address. For growing and successful merchants, you’re online store front is just one piece. Continuing to build the requisite infrastructure needed to handle the call center, latest shipping and billing information from your ERP system, and provide customer interaction history is an important step to ensure your company can scale effectively as online order volume grows.

To solve this issue Magento and SugarCRM are uniquely well paired. As Enterprise class open source applications, each provides the architectural framework to allow these two systems to be tightly integrated so whether you’re taking orders online, on the phone, in the store, or all 3, your customer service team can have one common view and representation of all that is occurring for that customer and your business.

Levementum, as the world’s largest SugarCRM partner, and Magento’s 2011 Emerging Partner of the year, has experience in bringing these two heavy weight champions together in an integrated solution set.

Levementum helped Valtim Marketing Solutions achieve this success by integrating SugarCRM and Magento Enterprise Edition to accommodate all customer touch points. You can read the brief Valtim Marketing Solutions Success Story for additional information on how this integration helped Valtim achieve the customer and sales success they were looking for with a completely integrated end-to-end solution.

Why Would a B2B Company Invest in an eCommerce Solution?

Derek Jacobson — Wed, 16 May 2012 18:26:38 +0000

A few questions to consider:

Is your company one of many that sells not only direct to consumers, but also through partners, affiliates, and/or distribution channels?
Have you discussed expanding your web presence to capture more online sales but held off because you view your direct to consumer (B2C) business too small to invest in?
Are you looking to find ways to lower the operational costs (or cost of sales) with supporting your channel sales model to allow investment in other growth areas?
What about giving your existing sales force the ability to service a larger number of clients, particularly new and smaller ones, without having to invest the same amount of sales time and effort?

One of the recent trends we see is companies that typically sell their goods and services through channel partners (resellers, distributors, affiliates) are looking to augment their traditional field or inside sales model with a more robust ecommerce solution. For B2B companies, it is common to multiple price lists per customer or customer tier, separate or even bonded inventory, and alternate payment terms and purchasing rules for their different sets of channel partners.

As these companies continue to grow, the cost of expanding their customer base through traditional means not only becomes cost ineffective, but it often results in declining customer value because the typical sales person can only support a certain number of target customers through manual processes.

Enter eCommerce solutions and Magento Enterprise. The Magento solution stack provides the framework for taking all levels of complexities per account or account type, and simplifying them into set or repeatable and high automated workflows that are integrated directly to your ERP system.

This system integration allows for consistent, up to date pricing, inventory levels and lead times, as well as greater customer self-sufficiency.

Levementum was able to create this efficiency for Troxell. To read more about how this solution helped Troxell and their customers by utilizing eCommerce technology to enable the next level of scale and growth for their sales force, read Troxell’s brief Solution Summary or the complete White Paper.

X.Commerce, What Could it Mean to You?

Derek Jacobson — Fri, 11 May 2012 19:03:40 +0000

X.commerce looks to provide the framework to solve the problems many businesses run into when they find themselves with systems integrated from a series of batch jobs or home grown systems. It is the grand vision that a registration on any of these systems could propagate in real time to other systems, and provide a truly universal view of a customer regardless of the means of interaction.

In the fall of 2011, Magento announced its x.commerce initiative to the world at the Innovate Conference. More precisely, Ebay announced x.commerce with Magento Enterprise Edition at its core. In its recent Imagine Conference in April of 2012, Magento provided a deeper look into this roadmap and what it means to the business customer.

Today, most mid to large companies have significant investments in eCommerce, ERP, CRM, Customer Service tools, and other point solutions which have been assembled from best of breed suppliers over the years. Some of these solutions are eventually integrated together via a series of batch jobs, and perhaps even real time interfaces using SOAP or REST. Often these integrations are limited and are cobbled together over several years. Still, it’s not uncommon for many to sit in their own silos, requiring manual rekeying of information between systems that results in errors, process breakdowns, and lower productivity within the enterprise.

What x.commerce is being positioned to offer is a method to tie many new era, often open source solutions, together through a common set of integration interfaces and protocols that allows companies to deploy and leverage a truly integrated set of tools that are linked as a means of planned and maintained architecture.

Consider the following scenario:

A customer registers on your website to look at products. They view items, perhaps add a few to their cart, but do not complete a purchase.
The customer then calls in to get information on a promotional program he or she saw. To assist in this, the call center rep has to create a contact record with a call note in a CRM tool.
The customer places an order via the phone, or perhaps via a catalog, resulting in a customer record being created in the ERP system as well. Now there is an order in ERP tied to a customer’s ‘master’ record which neither the ecommerce nor call center solution (often CRM) know about.
Now the customer calls in with a question about their order, the support representative has to first figure out how the order was placed, look it up in ERP, and then create a call tracking record in the CRM to keep track of the findings should the customer call again. Yet, the eCommerce site knows nothing of this.
Now, the customer wants to go back online and either check their existing order, which he or she can’t, or better yet, place a new order. That order often results in the creation of another customer record in ERP and CRM unless you’ve built out integrations between all 3 systems.

For sales, marketing and support – the benefit is obvious. For the IT professional… we can only hope the vision is realized.

What are your thoughts? What other benefits do you see x.commerce providing?

How to Upgrade Magento from Community to Enterprise…the right way.

Derek Jacobson — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 17:27:19 +0000

With the past 18 months of feature rich releases of Magento Enterprise, there has been a groundswell of Magento customers that are shifting from Community to Enterprise.

In Magento’s early days – the gap between the community and enterprise products was narrow…but that is no longer the case. New features, improved architecture, multi-storefront approaches, PCI, scale, speed – these are all areas that Magento has invested heavily in their Enterprise solution.

A large volume of merchants who have successfully grown their existing ecommerce business using Magento’s Community Edition have been confronted with the the need to improve their system scalability and features. as their online traffic increases.

In short, companies are quickly outgrowing the Community Edition. Many Community edition users have been painfuly confronted with the realization that trying to customize Magento Community Edition to try to mimic enterprise through custom code and the use extensions doesn’t really save money over time and can in fact cost more.

So…for all of you looking to make the Community to Enterprise move…here’s how to do it.

In this review, we will share some of the key items to consider when planning for your upgrade and what to expect when executing your upgrade project.

Step 1: Perform a detailed assessment of your current environment.

Upgrading to Magento Enterprise from Community Edition does not have to be a difficult process. But to do this in a predictable, reliable manner, there are some very important facts you need to know before you start.

First, what version of Community Edition (CE) are you using? If you are using version 1.5.0 or earlier, your upgrade is going to be more difficult. Architectural updates to the platforms beginning with the release of version 1.5.1 of CE will result in a multi-step upgrading process to resolve differences in the software stack. If you are working with a partner to do this upgrade, make sure you provide this information and make sure you provider can provide you with a game plan of what to expect.

Second, identify and document which extensions or plug-ins you have installed on your CE instance. For each extension installed, you’ll need to answer the following questions:

Is the extension you installed on CE required on EE or does EE offer similar functionality out of the box? For elements like coupons, pricing promotions, loyalty points, the answer is likely yes. As a result, you will likely not carry the extensions over to the new site, but you will probably need some form of data migration to move the data from the extension’s table structures into the out of the box Enterprise Edition instances.
If the extension is not duplicated by out of the box EE functionality, is there an EE version available you can use? Note, many extensions used on community edition are not supported on Enterprise Edition at all. In some cases, an EE version may exist, but you need to purchase a different version or license key and apply a new package that is compatible with EE.
1. If you are going to be implementing an EE version of an extension, make sure the provider has documentation or can walk you through how to upgrade your CE version to EE version.
2. If the extension is not duplicated by out of the box Magento EE functionality, and an EE version of the extension does not exist, you will need a plan and timeline to either update the extension’s code to work with EE or replace it with a custom built set of logic or functionality.

For step 1, plan on spending a day to catalog your extensions and at least one to two days reviewing the alternative solutions and building your plan to address items 1, 2 and 3.

Step 2: Check for Core file changes

Once you have cataloged your extensions lists and defined your areas of impact, the next thing you need to consider is whether you have made changes to the core Magento files (non upgrade safe changes). Note, Magento’s architecture has a defined method for applying changes in an upgrade safe. Your IT team member or services partner may want to consider taking a copy of your site, and a clean, unmodified version of Magento CE that you are using and do a ‘diff’ on the core file structures to see what has been changed, if anything.

If you have made core file changes, note, you will want to take a full back up of the changed files because there is a strong likelihood that the upgrade will overwrite some of these changes, if not all.

Make sure you comment the sections of code where you identified core changes.

*A note on integration work. Integrations are typically done in an upgrade safe way. However, you want to pay special attention at this point to document and backup any files you used to integrate Magento to any other system. These will be critical points of verification as you move forward.

Once the changes have been documented and backed up, move on to step 3.

Step 3: Plan for test and deployment

Start with the end in mind, plan for testing and deployment before you start your upgrade project work.

You don’t want to upgrade your production instance right away. In fact, you may not want totally upgrade your production instance at all, you may want the two instances running side by side for a time to give you a fallback option is something goes wrong.

So first, plan on how you will deploy your upgrade to production and where you will do you upgrade project and testing prior to launch. We strongly recommend you setup a development site and server. This means having a separate physical host (or virtual server) that will not share resources with your production server. The upgrade process can be resource intensive – you don’t want to disrupt any production activity during this project.

Once you have your development / test server in place, take a full back up of your production site (code and database). Deploy it to your development server, and keep a copy of the backup zipped up for reapplication if you need it. You don’t want to have to take multiple backups if you run into issues early on in the process.

With the development site in place, you’re now ready to plan for your acceptance testing.

It is a great practice to document your testing steps and expected results (an Excel Spreadsheet is fine) before you start work. Take screen shots so you can compare before and after results to make sure your logic changes work the same after the upgrade. Make sure you define all the key conditions you need to validate before you launch to production.

Also, make sure you test scripts include a means of validating that any integration interfaces you had in place still work properly. Integration is usually time consuming, and you don’t want to realize after you’ve deployed to production that you need to update this portion of your site post go live.

Trying to put this together after you’ve done your upgrade can be very difficult – so start with the end in mind.

Step 4: Execute the upgrade

Time to upgrade.

Based on your assessments in steps 1 and 2, you should begin applying the upgrade package and working through your plan for extension or core file change management.

If you are starting with version 1.5.1, the upgrade to the current version will be relatively quick (a day of effort to run through and do an initial validation of results) and painless. Reapplying extensions, core file changes or new logic will then occur and the effort for that will depend on the volume of changes you have to support. If you don’t have many extensions or any core file changes, this part may take as little as a few days.

If you have a large number of extensions, core file changes, etc, you could spend a few weeks going through this process.

**Note, critical success factor for managing time, budget and success.

We strong urge that customers NOT begin adding new functionality or features right away or as part of the upgrade process. Moving to Magento Enterprise Edition will arm you with an entire new set of features and tools. You should strongly consider releasing the upgraded site first, let it bake in, learn about what you now have at your disposal, and then plan on what new features and functionality you want to add after your new site is in production and you are comfortable that everything is stable.

You will learn that Magento EE does more than you think. You’ll also learn that the approaches to adding new functionality change with EE and it is a much more flexible architecture. – A little patience on this front will save you time and money overall.

Step 5: Test, Validate, Revise

Once you have what you consider to be an upgraded development instance, it’s time to execute your test plan. Go through and test with detail that the upgraded development site functions substantially the same as what you previously documented. Validate not only that it is error free, but that calculations, taxes, UI elements, etc. all match up. Be sure to test any integration interfaces you had in place and that integration transactions work properly. Finally, make sure that any extensions you replaced, upgraded or removed work properly or that the intended revised functionality based on EE out of the box tools works as you expect it to.

When you can confidently say you have validated your existing, as is functionality is working properly, you are ready to plan for a move to EE in production.

Step 6: Plan for Go Live

To convert your in production site to EE, you’ll need to do one of two things:

Either plan for some minor downtime on the site (and have a site down for maintenance notice page in place ready to go)
Stage a parallel EE Production site with the completed/ upgraded software in place and plan to cut over from one box to the other, realizing you may have a few straggling orders in the old site that either don’t show in the new site or need to be migrated over via a data migration.

When you do this, the biggest thing to realize is that if you are making DNS changes to point to a new host, those changes may take up to 24 hours to propagate nationwide or worldwide.

As a result, it’s a good idea in advance of your launch (at least 3 or 4 days in advance) to reduce the Time to Live (TTL) settings on your DNS entries to as low a value as possible so that the changes propagate as quickly as possible.

Even with a low TTL, some traffic will still route to the old IP address for a little while unless you’re firewall or network configuration has a rule in place to route to the new host internally.

Either way, plan to make the production move at the beginning of what is a low traffic period for you. Most people automatically assume this means weekends. For B2B oriented sites, that might be the case. But realistically, you should look at which days of the week (and times of day) have the lowest volume. It very well may be that a weekday in the morning is the best time to make the change.

When you plan your cutover, make sure that all necessary support, admin and customer service representatives are aware of the change so that if call volume to your office increases, they can give a clear message and that they are prepared for any spikes in activity.

Step 7: Plan for “Post Deployment” Support – you need a plan in place before you launch your live site

This is the one area that is constantly overlooked or undervalued. When you make any large change, you will find that something comes up post launch that you either didn’t anticipate or that you missed somewhere in your process.

If you are launching in off or late hours, your support staff will need to be calibrated to provide late hours support and probably be in early the next day in the event there is an issue to triage.

If you running a site with high volumes of traffic or orders, you, your support staff, and your IT team or partner need to have a plan in place for ongoing bursts of activity for at least the first week post launch.

Once you get through week 1 and all is calm, then it’s time to prepare for the next batch of new functionality you wish to implement.

A Review of Magento Enterprise Edition

Holly Davis — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 00:54:26 +0000

Making news earlier this year with its acquisition by eBay, Magento continues to make waves with its Magento Enterprise eCommerce solution – which is a groundbreaking platform whose functionality is only surpassed by its flexibility.

For those whose view of eCommerce is limited to placing products on Ebay or Yahoo Carts, Magento Enterprise is going to come as a revolutionary solution that can enhance their entire revenue model without breaking the bank. For those who view eCommerce as an Enterprise class sales channel for B2C or B2B solutions, Magento Enterprise is going to come as a staunchly robust, pleasantly flexible and powerful platform, that dispels the notion that enterprise eCommerce software must cost six figures.

Built as an open source platform, Magento Enterprise Edition’s software architecture leverages a well designed enterprise-class PHP framework and is designed to run on the MySQL database platform. Magento comes in three editions:

Community Edition
Professional Edition
Enterprise Edition

Each of these three versions has varying levels of functionality; with the Community edition being more than satisfactory for a basic store front, and the Enterprise edition containing all the security and commerce functions that a serious business needs. CE is free, and each subsequent version has an annual subscription rate, with Enterprise being the higher price solution (and with Magento’s Enterprise surprising low cost, “higher” is definitely a relative term).

While many will be attracted to Magento because of the free community edition, most businesses that see eCommerce and the Internet as a core sales channel will see the platform of choice is the Enterprise edition. This product review will focus on the Enterprise edition and provide some version comparisons which demonstrate the value add of this licensed edition.

About the product – Key features

Most customers will notice that Magento has a decisive B2C flavor. Key features an online retailer would desire are natively supplied out of the box such as:

Loyalty reward program
Gift Certificate / cards
Store Credit management
Content Management System (CMS) to add / edit static content
Customer groups / attributes that allow you to create customer tiers with a pricing rules engine to implement dynamic pricing levels based on membership or customer classification
PCI certification for credit card processing
Ability to create multiple store fronts from one instance
Ability to create virtual catalogs so that store fronts can leverage subsets of a base root catalog and override pricing and other product attribute data
With version 1.11, RMA and other customer support / warehouse tools are improved or added as well

Customers looking to implement complex B2B solutions with customer specific (contract) pricing models will find that the setup and implementation timeline will take about 25% to 35% longer depending on the number of price lists or virtual catalogs needed for support.

B2B customers who wish to add price quote request / management workflows, purchase order and credit line controls, as well as bonded inventory tracking should expect to spend time applying customized code to meet these models. *Note, Magento’s architecture allows these customizations to be applied predictably and in an upgrade safe manner, but customization is required for these elements.

About the User Interface

One of the greatest benefits of Magento, which seems to be the least well publicized element, is how dynamically the user interface and skin or theme can be changed. For those implementing their first eCommerce site or releasing their first Magento eCommerce site, we highly encourage you to view the Extensions list on www.magentocommerce.com, particularly the design and theme section. There are more than 1800 pre-built themes to use as a UI starting point, more than half of which can be downloaded for free.

This allows a customer to find a UI design that largely matches their needs and within hours have a working, customized interface applied so you can focus on the core of your implementation – products, pricing, and order capture.

Most customers wish to change their UI experience within 12 months regardless of whether they use a pre-built theme or a custom built one, thus, leveraging a low cost and personalized starting template makes the most sense from an ROI perspective.

About Performance

Doing a Google search on Magento performance will result a number of posting about slow page loads and poor performance. Here’s what you need to know:

Most of these refer to Magento Community Edition installations. Community Edition is not optimized, not supported, and is for the smallest of eCommerce sites. If you are planning on running a site that gets more than 25 orders per day or 200 visitors a day, performance alone should get you to consider Professional or Enterprise edition.
Magento Enterprise is highly optimized and leverages high levels of page and index caching.
Magento Enterprise benefits for dedicated, high levels of memory to allow the greatest levels of caching. One of the biggest mistakes customers make early on is to skimp on memory on their server or cloud host. For enterprise customers, regardless of transaction load, a minimum of 8 GB of RAM should be used to allow the most effective use of database and web page caching possible. True high performance / high transaction load sites should consider implementing a dedicated caching server using Memcache.
For customers who plan to support more than 500 transactions / 8000 visitors a day, you should consider a dedicated database server and separate web server / servers. The CPU and memory utilization of these two areas can begin to compete at higher visitor loads and simply increasing resources on a single box can offer diminishing returns.

What you should expect when implementing Magento Enterprise

For B2C implementations largely using out of the box functionality, 3 to 4 calendar weeks for a start to finish project is reasonable (assumes less than 2500 SKU’s and less than 2500 customer profile records to migrate, excluding order history). Integration requests, custom theme development, or B2B pricing / order control logic will add time to this base.

The areas that will have the greatest impact to you in terms of time commitment will fall into the following categories:

Assembling data – getting your product, category and attribute data will take you more of YOUR time than you expect. Start early… make this a critical focus item.
Design revisions – This is one area people get carried away and drive time and cost while adding diminishing value is on the UI design. If you have a solid, clean, modern and professional interface, there is a point where each round of change does nothing but increase cost of implementation. A good word of advice is to start simple, measure feedback in the first month, and then drive additional UI revisions based on actual results not ‘best guess hunches’.
Be aware of the impact of social media. A reputable firm can leverage Magento Enterprise to help you create a simple and consistent method to allow your customers to publicize your offerings on Facebook and Twitter. While it can at times be difficult to measure the financial impact of these placements, the value of Brand Equity is important and current research shows a growing bias in Gen Y and New Millennial customers to trust Social Media services.
If you are working with a service provider, make sure you have a post release support model in place BEFORE you go live. If you’re site is successful, you will want to do more quickly. Discussing how you will do this, and how you will work with your partner to take all the possible ‘wants’ and distill that down to a group of ‘needs’ is important. The rush of activity that can come post release can cause a person to lose site of the prioritization discipline they so effectively followed leading up to the launch.
Understand that when implementing Magento Enterprise; you aren’t ‘done’ or ‘stuck with what you have’. Magento releases functional updates two to three times per year. For the engaged online merchant, each release included new functionality and features you can leverage to expand your offering and drive customer retention. Put a plan in place to upgrade one to two times per year – software upgrade files are including in your subscription, so make sure you and your provider have a plan / roadmap to make use of what is provided to you over time.
Be aware of additional services and extensions that add value. One of the value that Magento’s open source architecture provides is that many value add services have pre-built services you can leverage to further expand your offering. Companies like ListTrack offer SaaS marketing solutions designed to reduce shopping cart abandonment and drive sales volume. Satori is a great service for address data verification that can reduce returned shipments and improve the quality of follow up marketing communications. These are just a small sample of how a strong platform encourages others to add additional value with minimal additional investment. This ecosystem is only going to grow over time.

About Hosting and Infrastructure

Unless you are firm that has an established, well manned data center, you should the use of a cloud hosting provider. For a fixed monthly cost, all the IT operational issues of patching, backups, network / switch management can be addressed. A quality cloud hosting provider can also provider a very simple, predictable upgrade path for hardware improvements over time as your load and demand grows.

While there are several excellent options in this space, we strongly recommend customers consider Peer1 Hosting. Peer1 has developed the overall size and scale that ensures it’s processes are repeatable and that the company is well beyond ‘a going certain state’, but they have not reached the level of bureaucratic organization that results in simple change requests requiring 5 days advance notice. SLA’s are defined, they are SAS 70 certified, own their entire infrastructure and Tier 1 support is better than most other organizations. Finally, their pricing is competitive with similar offerings while offering far superior services.

About Magento – the company and the roadmap

Magento is now a wholly owned subsidiary of Ebay. This has several significant implications.

Capital investment for the platform is more secure than ever. Ebay has publicly demonstrated how Magento Enterprise Edition is a cornerstone element of its x.commerce initiative. Any fear or doubt about the long term viability of the platform and company should now be put to rest.

In addition, Ebay and Magento have demonstrated a repeatable process and ability to incorporate value add services.

One of the key roadmap elements customers should be aware of is Ebay’s intention to leverage Magento Enterprise as a means for a merchant to sell not only direct, but through Ebay and Amazon.com through one management console instance.

With the potential for a local enterprise eCommerce presences to position and manage store fronts on Ebay and Amazon.com natively from one site – customers can dramatically add value to their investments. Ebay has already shown an ability to deliver on these types of roadmap items and those considering Magento should evaluate how the ability to drive not only direct traffic, but also take advantage of two of the largest online market places in the world would impact their growth potentials.

Short term or long term…on the basis of cost…on the basis of features…on the basis of architecture…Magento Enterprise is a winner.

Levementum & Magento Present: eCommerce Forum & Customer Case Study

Holly Davis — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 22:41:18 +0000

At Levementum, we understand that in order to reach and serve customers today, retailers need an eCommerce presence. There is a wealth of opportunity for companies who create an eCommerce site that is designed from the ground up to engage customers and turn browsers to buyers. Magento, one of Levementum’s selected solution partners, is a leading developer in eCommerce software. Together we want to share what Magento can offer your business.

We invite you to be our guest at the Arizona eCommerce Forum on Thursday, September 29. During this event you will learn about the fastest growing eCommerce platform in the world – Magento Enterprise – and all of the features that will help you attract more customers, improve customer loyalty, increase your average order value and maximize conversion rates.

Levementum will share how we created a modern, user-friendly online store using Magento Enterprise for Troxell Communications, the largest privately owned audio-video equipment distributor in the U.S. The new system made online shopping easy for Troxell customers, allowed them to penetrate new markets and provided seamless integration on the back-end with their existing systems including an Appx ERP system.

Register HERE today, space is LIMITED!

AGENDA

Thursday, September 29

9 – 9:30 am: Check-in and Breakfast

9:30 am – 12:00 pm: Magento presentation & Demonstration

Levementum Case Study

Q&A, Networking

Location

55 N. Arizona Place Suite 101

Chandler, AZ 85225

Although this event is FREE, you must register as space is limited.

eBay buys Magento…what does it mean?

Geoffrey Mobisson — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 00:05:22 +0000

As most of you know, eBay bought out Magento last week, picking up the 51% of the company it didn’t own. While I have no idea what they paid for it, we do know that its initial purchase of Magento (the 49%) valued the company at 45 million. I would bet the farm that the remaining 51% cost them at least 2-3 times as much, netting them out at a valuation of between 100-200m, and fetching at least 50-100m in this transaction. That is, of course, pure speculation.

More importantly, the question is, what does this mean for Customers and Partners? I feel Brian Walker’s take on this at the Forrester Blog is right on the money:

For Magento users, this is a very good thing. It is time for Magento to mature as a solution and as a business. The same development approach and business practices which can support a small insurgent open source commerce platform do not scale to supporting multiple products with very diverse needs and across many maturing clients. Users of Magento’s enterprise solution have been struggling with support and product traction as Magento invested in the MagentoGo SaaS solution and tried to manage a rodeo of new and existing partners, customer acquisition, and diverse product initiatives. In retrospect this was too much to take on at once, and Magento may have outgrown their ability to deliver on the expectations. With the completion of this acquisition eBay has the ability to clarify the product initiatives, add needed investment to product development, and mature the support given to developers, partners and customers. A failure to do so will erode the Magento value proposition and see a raft of clients evaluating their long term commerce capability solution providers and platforms. It will take time for the core challenges to resolve, so for Magento users struggling now this announcement will mean little in the short-term. For Magento users in the longer-term this should be a positive.

So, we will see….and Levementum, as a Magento partner is excited about the change, and optimistic about the future!

Global OSS: Expanding to Australia…why Levementum did it.

Geoffrey Mobisson — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 00:10:44 +0000

Recently I’ve been fielding a number of questions about why the company I work for, Levementum, decided to open an office in Australia (see press release: http://www.prweb.com/releases/20100814/levementum_sydney_au/prweb4386444.htm.)

The first thing I tell them to do, is look at the following Global Open Source Adoption webpage sponsored by RedHat: http://www.redhat.com/about/where-is-open-source/activity/. Australian adoption and environmental acceptance is widespread and growing. Few countries in the world have seen the kind of growth that we’re seeing down under. Why?

Australia leads the way in OSS adoption

1. They see it as a national imperative to help reverse the tide of excess IT imports: Consider this: from the charter of the FOSS/Australia organization:

“According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, Information and Communications Technology (ICT) represents 13.8 per cent of total investment in Australia. According to a 2006 study, ICT comprises 8.4 per cent of all imports, but only 2.8 per cent of all exports. Australia loses more from importing ICT than we gain from exporting wheat and coal combined. Through leveraging FOSS, local companies are able to create and offer world-class products and services….When you support FOSS, you are supporting Australian innovation and employment.”

2. Growth in the open source services sector: While we aren’t late to the party down under, we’re certainly not the first OSS service players down there. See an excerpt from the “Open Source Industry Australia” group:

“With at least sixteen independent South Australian organisations reportedly offering support services for open source software this demonstrates that there is real choice available to South Australian organisations seeking to obtain support for open source software on a commercial basis.”

3. Government backing. Australians are looking for new and innovative ways of leveraging open source in the government sector.

4. Technology leadership in Australia. Australia continues to lead the way terms of education and investment in technology.

5. Raw data. Our biggest partner,SugarCRM has been growing in leaps and bounds in Australia and Asia, and in general, Open source solutions like Sugar have tremendous rates of adoption in Australia.

It’s only natural that Levementum, as a global leader in SugarCRM and other open source solutions, expands its presence there.

Open Source Notes from the Left Bank: OSS Adoption in Europe

Geoffrey Mobisson — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 01:21:32 +0000

This past October 2009, I was lucky enough to be invited to participate in the Free Libre Open Source Summit and Think Tank in Paris, France. It was an opportunity for me to learn from the best and brightest that the world of open source has to offer – but more importantly, it was an opportunity to understand why, given the global relevance and reach of open source, Europe has so clearly established itself as the most dominating “consumer” of open source enterprise applications.

If you take one look at the global deployment footprint of say, a SugarCRM, or say an OpenBravo, clearly something is going on across the pond, that makes them more receptive, more successful, more bold and more committed, to the adoption of open source enterprise applications. Given the spirit of innovation, and the burgeoning commercial open source business emerging in the US, I was curious…why there? why not here in the States? why not in Asia? Whats different?

At the conference, I came across folks from a number of VARs and integrators. I was introduced to Smile consulting (www.smile.fr), a 300 person firm focused on Open Source implementation in France. The team from RedPill-Linpro, the open source stalwarts from the Nordic region. There were countless mid sized open source firms, all successful, all bullish about the future.

I immediately started to wonder, where the hell are the open source firms in the US? Sure, we’ve got an abundance of innovators at the individual contributor level. But large going concerns, exclusively focused on open source? You’ve got us – Levementum, and maybe Optaros, and maybe 2-3 others that are out there…but thats it. And none of us are close to the big European players in size or reach. So…Why? After 6 glasses of Beaujolais in a bar on the Champs – I started to get some answers. I’d name the individual references, but I suppose they were casualties of the investigative process(!).

I’ve come up with a few reasons. Its not comprehensive, but its a start.

1. The reach of Government and the power of associations in Europe: No one doubts that the reach of government in Europe is far deeper than we’re accustomed to in the US. Invariably, as is the case with most agencies of the state – there is a need to do more with less. The notion of ROI tends to be “cost reference” versus the traditional “value reference” as it relates to implementation of technology. Of course, value is paramount with respect to implementation, but the purchase profiles and criterion are different. Additionally there is a clear distrust that the EU has for the big “IT gorillas” of the US…the Oracles, the Microsofts, et al. The combination of cost sensitivity, government policy, and mistrust has led European government agencies to supremely value “control of their destinies”…perhaps more so than their US counterparts. Clearly open source gives them this control: on cost, on features, on scale, on customization. This explanation, provided by my dear friends in Paris, made a lot of sense to me.

2. The need for regionally customized solutions in Europe. As a native of Boston, Mass, I can tell you there’s a lot of difference between Beantown and say, the Big Apple. It starts with the Sox and the evil empire…but thats another story. Back to point…even with the great diversity of the US, we still have a fairly homogeneous culture of business. Try and contrast French business practices with say Italian business practices. Try and take your Spanish salesforce, and send them to close a deal in Copenhagen. Doable yes…easy no. Europeans are fiercely proud of their language, culture and history, and it permeates the business sphere in every way imaginable. The walls start with language differences, and follow through to customs and legal practice. Invariably, a business solution that works in Kiev, is likely not going to seamlessly work in London. Open source applications, buttressed by their optimal flexibility, clean architectures, and open development environments, offer the European regions to shape a core of business features to their regional needs. The US regions have much less of a need in this dimension. These characteristics, that are inherent to open source, are vital in Europe.

3. The fall of the wall and the influx of skilled Eastern European engineers into the European market. With the fall of communism in Europe, millions of eastern European engineers and scientists were emancipated, armed tremendous skill, unparalleled resourcefulness, and a hunger for tools. With a dearth of capital available to them…many of these great scientists and engineers jumped head long into open-source. This created not only a skilled mass of open source experts and professionals, but also created new innovations that served to accelerate open source application adoption throughout Europe and the World. If you want proof of this…take a look at odesk.com or guru.com. Eastern European software developers outnumber just about any other global region (with respect to open source technologies).

In summary, its the perfect storm of demand, culture, and supply. This European tempest will rage for quite some time…and frankly, I’m happy about it. There are some lessons learned that I’m sure we can apply here in the new country!

NOTE: Ok…so, so what…what have I learned that we can apply here in the US? I’m going to crack this code somehow – the elements related to government don’t seem to be that different than today’s US. There’s an opportunity there I’m sure.

What do these Open Source applications have in common?

David Baier — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 02:07:28 +0000

You have likely heard the names before, especially if you are an advocate or user of open source software. Beginning about, 3 or 4 years ago open source software began to get noticed in the world of enterprise applications. The clear leader and fore-runner in the enterprise was SugarCRM, now several other common or soon to be common names join SugarCRM as credible enterprise applications and ‘Bossie’ award winners. SugarCRM, Compiere, Magento and Pentaho are all 2009 Bossie Award Winners. The Bossie’s are awards bestowed upon the Best of Open Source Software. These applications though different in their capabilities and purpose share three distinct similarities:

1) They are all Bossie award winners – best in class in their respective categories.

2) They all can be integrated and complement each other in a typical enterprise.

3) They all are partners with Levementum, an emerging leader in the open source community as a system integrator and implementer.

Levementum’s customers span small business requiring CRM (SugarCRM) and a web store (Magento) to the multi-billion dollar enterprise requiring ERP (Compiere), CRM (SugarCRM), e-Commerce (Magento) and Business Intelligence (Pentaho) all complementing each other. Creating synergy between these applications is both the dream and nightmare of most CIO’s. Levementum has made this their bread-and-butter and understand the importance of applications that are integrated and support a single verison of the truth in an enterprise of any size.

Congratulations to the 2009 Bossie Award Winners.