magento

Getting open-source criticism wrong

It's increasingly difficult to separate "open-source vendors" from "proprietary vendors," but Demandware, a proprietary software-as-a-service (SaaS) vendor, is attempting to do so in an effort to stem the rising tide of Magento, an open-source e-commerce project. Demandware's criticism of Magento largely falls flat, however, because it uses outdated descriptions of open source.

Demandware walks through a litany of complaints about open source--requires too many developers! forces you to upgrade your software all by yourself! forking and fragmentation!--but none hit the mark. Why? Because each is only somewhat accurate of the state of open … Read more

Mix and match: The perfect open-source Web commerce company

Occasionally I get brilliant ideas about whom should merge with whom in open source. OK, so it's very occasionally, but I think I'll start sharing them under a "Mix and match" headline.

Forget Fantasy Football. It's time for "Fantasy Open Source."

Over the past few weeks I've spent a fair amount of time with the Acquia team, the company that offers a commercial distribution of the ubiquitous Drupal open-source Web content management system. Drupal is very strong in Web publishing and has an amazing community following, which makes it a nice pairing … Read more

Magento's open-source e-commerce platform makes progress--Q&A

Open source continues to move beyond its original confines of infrastructure software. Open-source application adoption is booming, while even the curmudgeonly router market is getting some open-source polish from Vyatta.

One area, in particular, that is getting an open-source makeover is e-commerce, with Magento apparently leading the pack with more than 750,000 downloads and a roster of great customers, albeit with strong competition from Oxid and Apache's OFBiz project.

I've written about Magento before but wanted to dive in a bit deeper, so I contacted Roy Rubin, CEO and founder of Varien, the company behind Magento, for … Read more

Magento gets Forrester's attention

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 … Read more

JumpBox service to deploy apps on Amazon EC2

Installing an open-source enterprise application has never been easier. No hardware? No sophisticated IT department? No problem. At least, not if you use one of 38 JumpBox-enabled open-source applications, as it announced recently.

A rising number of companies offer virtualized instances of popular open-source applications, but JumpBox takes it a step further, deploying to the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service, almost completely obviating hardware and setup quandaries.

JumpBox offers small to midsize organizations a library of open-source applications packaged as pre-built, pre-configured virtual appliances through JumpBox Open, its annual subscription service. Public Amazon Machine Images (AMI) for 12 JumpBox … Read more

Open-source e-commerce increasingly means Magento

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.… Read more

Open-source ecommerce platforms: Nine of the best reviewed

Want to sell online? Not Your Average Geeks blog has reviewed nine of the best, including Magento which I reviewed last year.

On Magento, the review notes:

...[M]y what a fantastic job they have done on this product. It's by far one of the more exciting e-commerce platforms available for free on the market today. Dripping with features, they really have thought of everything. Wishlists, shop by price and category, item comparison - all the things we've come to expect from professional web stores. It's software as good as this that really keeps licensed software on … Read more

Under the Radar: Managing your business online

Security, reliability, and stickiness were key talking points at an Under the Radar session showcasing online business collaboration tools. Presenters included Act-On Software, Magento, Mumboe, and NetBooks. While all presenters emphasized their company's ability to offer software as a service, Magento and NetBooks especially focused on tools for small business.

The Cisco-funded Act-On Software combines Salesforce.com's leads database with WebEx's large-scale conferencing to add invitation and follow-up services and pull data between the two. For example, Act-On runs as a tab within Salesfoce, WebEx, and Microsoft applications, and can show Salesforce data after a WebEx conference. … Read more

And now you can sell things with open source, too. Introducing Magento

Jack Aboutboul at Red Hat clued me into an interesting open-source ecommerce platform today. Called Magento, it's built by Varien and is "a feature-rich, professional open-source eCommerce solution offering merchants complete flexibility and control over the look, content, and functionality of their online store."

Put in English, Magento is an open-source solution for setting up and managing an online store. The product appears to be pretty robust already, but the roadmap looks even better.

If you need to set up an online store, why pay the six- to seven-figures to do so when you can use Magento … Read more

SoCal geeks ready for the spotlight

With free DVDs handed out at the door, numerous camera crews shooting interviews, and--oh yes--"special guest" celebrity blogger Perez Hilton, last night's Twiistup party seemed proof that the Los Angeles tech community is pulling out of the shadow of Silicon Valley and putting its own spin on geek culture.

Like its predecessor, Twiistup 3 packed a sold-out crowd of Web folks and other geeks (including Doug Campbell from Tuxedo Travels and CNET alumnus Rich DeMuro) into the Air Conditioned Supper Club in Venice, where attendees talked tech, networked, and vetted business plans over drinks. And while … Read more