Magento crowned as a leader in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant 2018 Report

Magento is back again with a big news. Magento has been listed as a leader in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant 2018 report. It’s 3rd time in a row. The report evaluates 18 of the major players in the digital commerce space including Magento Commerce and others like Oracle, IBM, Salesforce and SAP.

The report has been generated focussing on the ability of the eCommerce platforms to transform businesses and their innovative approaches aimed at catering to the future needs of end users.

Magento’s fast-paced delivery of innovations is a major reason for this recognition and here’s a break up of the key ones:

• The platform moved its enterprise-grade sophisticated eCommerce offering to cloud (AWS) as a SaaS-based managed service platform. The fact that it had the flexibility to be deployed on dedicated (on-premises) server environments and other third-party clouds made it a viable option for big eCommerce retailers. Magento also holds intact, its open-source offering, Magento Open Source.
• Recently Magento introduced Magento OM – a full-fledged order management system for order processing and Magento Business Intelligence that provides microscopic level insights to make data-driven business decisions.
• Magento added a wide range of B2B capabilities encouraging more B2B players to consider it as their commerce platform of choice. With B2B-centric provisions like quote management, price negotiation, custom catalogs and pricing, content management, order and inventory management, Magento is appearing to be a promising contender in the B2B segment as well.
• Magento also rolled out CPQ solution that helps in simplifying difficulties in competitive product pricing, identifying upsell opportunities and making up-to-date pricing data available for sales reps.
• Magento Social Commerce enables eCommerce retailers to sell on social platforms like Facebook with provisions to get started quickly and advertise as well.
• Marketplace connectivity – For brands that need marketplace integration as an additional sales channel, the marketplace module of Magento will prove beneficial. This module enables direct integration with Amazon. Magento will be adding integration for other preferred marketplaces like eBay and Walmart later this year (2018).

These initiatives from Magento has helped in extending its strength and presence across the B2C and B2B eCommerce space.

What’s ahead?

1. Magento still has a long way to go in terms of ease of personalization as it is still reliant on third-party products and agencies for this part, which, in case of its arch-rivals, is much more native.
2. Product Information Management (PIM) is yet another area where Magento has not focused yet. With social media and marketplace integration coming in, PIM becomes a mandatory option that has to be provided as a built-in capability for brands to handle huge volumes of product information across different sales channels. Building a robust PIM could be a large initiative, at least, for the time being, Magento can consider offering stable connectors to integrate with market leading PIM solutions.
3. AI and Machine-learning-based feature introductions can help Magento increase the lead with its competition.

With the recent acquisition of Magento by Adobe, Magento is expected to overcome its existing hurdles and diversify its built-in capabilities. However, we will have to wait and see whether the new omnichannel capabilities will be made available on a SaaS model or as open source.