Gartner Magic Quadrant for E-Commerce 2013

Commerceserver.net is delighted to acknowledge Gartner’s placement of its product Commerce Server on their Magic Quadrant (MQ) for E-Commerce 2013. Whilst the placement within the lower left quadrant may be viewed as disappointing for partners, customers, and prospects of the product, we feel it's important to clarify several important aspects about the evaluation process.

First, commerceserver.net undertook the provision of information for the MQ during the middle of 2012, prior to the final transition phase of the product from Microsoft. Under the terms of that transfer, we were unable to disclose critical customer information for Gartner to consider.

Furthermore, the evaluation period was concluded before we had launched Commerce Server 10, our first new version and the first major revision of the product for several years and therefore both it, and our exciting roadmap for the product, could not be considered in the ranking. We welcome the strengths noted, and of the cautions raised in the MQ, we provide the following guidance:

Partner ecosystem – At the time of the MQ consultation, we had no partner ecosystem whatsoever having just taken over the product from Microsoft. During the intervening months, our partner list has grown dramatically, including most of the key Microsoft Commerce Server partners, and our current pipeline of new partners leads us to believe that by the end of 2013 we will have an active network of 50 worldwide partners, far eclipsing the number active with Microsoft previously. All of these partners have actively sought to work with commerceserver.net and are implementing solutions worldwide.

Built-in Capabilities – We fully acknowledge the work that needs to be done with the product. We have developed an extremely strong roadmap, publicly debuted at https://www.commerceserver.net/roadmap/, which addresses many of the gaps noted. Furthermore, we are well underway with business development activities that will see Commerce Server
become integrated with some of the best in-breed .NET and .NET-friendly solutions within the broader customer experience management ecosystem – and we look forward to debuting some of these partnerships in the second half of 2013.Together and coupled with our considerably more agile engineering lifecycle, we feel that within the next 18-24 months, we will be able to evolve Commerce Server into a significantly competitive offering.

Pricing – We truly believe that our subscription pricing model is a future proof model that will allow customers to pay for what they use and will provide a great foundation for our cloud versions which will be available during early 2013. Everyone acknowledges that eCommerce environments have peak periods and we are actively trying to address these scenarios in such a way that customers are not paying for the “downtime” just to be able to switch the capabilities on for a few months of the year. We have also been actively working with existing Microsoft customers wanting to migrate to commerceserver.net and are ensuring that they face no financial penalties for doing so. In addition, we are matching their Microsoft discount levels despite the TCO of our product already being ~50% lower. We are not aware of anyone paying more and most are paying significantly less.

We will continue to work with Gartner in the months and years ahead to appraise them of the progress we are making and we fully expect to see a significant improvement in our position by the time the next MQ is published. Anyone with concerns about the MQ are welcome to contact us for a more in-depth analysis and briefing.