We share our hastily written notes from the Magento Partners day, 12th November 2012.
Magento had 29 people at Magento Live - London being the first host to a Magento Live event. Roy Rubin, Magento CEO reported Magento Enterprise growth 3x since Q1 2011, two thirds at least of that buisness was won with partners. In all there are 2000+ Magento Enterprise customers.
In the UK now there is a dedicated team in of two major account sales people, 1 partner manager & 1 customer success exec.
In 2013, Roy explained that the big focus would be on serving customers more effectively: helping customers scale and acquiring merchants at scale. Internally, Magento is now being seen as the long-term ecommerce platform for eBay - the tactic has changed recently - and it now has increasing significance in the evolution of x-commerce.
Roy described how Magento's development plans for the near term were focussed on scale: stores, catalogues, orders, caches - enabling merchants to grow with the platform & get merchants to be happy with their investment. Baruch Toledano, director of product marketing, explained how performance / scalability improvements will be delivered via service packs from early 2013.
There will be no Magento 2 in 2013. This project is a huge job to get the whole ecosystem: Magento, partners, extension providers all need to be brought on board and integrated. There is consequently not a large focus on 1.x functional improvements.
Scott Dahlgren, director partners, discussed developments in the partner programme (Screen Pages is a Silver Partner). His byline was: competency means certification which in turn increases the viability of success. 100% of partners listed on the Magento website have been screened as competent & able to deliver customer success. Magento partners should invest in Magento and promote to customers. Magento plans to grade partners by getting feedback directly from partners via its customer success team.
Magento is also working on an implementation methodology. We hope to be part of that initiative and contribute to its development via our project management team.
The proceedings wound down with discussion about the quality and ratings of third-party extensions. Some are good, some are bad!