The big ecommerce vendors and golf!

You have a seriously large ecommerce implementation to deliver, which vendor do you choose? Is it the safe established brands like Webshere and ATG or is it the new kids on the block like Demanware, Hybris and Magento. Here at xpractical we think that anyone of these can do the job, the success factor is the same as golf, the toolset needs to be adequate but the outcome is almost totally depended on the player. The same goes for ecommerce, the project success is totally dependent on your implementation partner. Once you get past cost there are 4 main factors to determine to find the right implementation partner:

1) Project delivery history
2) Skilled resource availability
3) Business health of the implementation partner
4) Domain expertise


Assessing these factors is difficult, but with the right RFP/RFQ and industry knowledge not impossible

Here is a bit of industry gossip around resourcing to get you started:

ATG - Been around for years, Oracle owned, not seeing much delivery activity in the Melbourne market, maybe suited to bigger retail than we have here

Websphere - Also been around for years, lead the early adoption in B2B and B2C, seems to be a very serious shortfall in top end configuration skills, A quick query in seek shows 150 jobs available. Unless you have a guru here ( not Bangalore ) its going to take a year to deliver a project

Demandware - Hosted cloud model means less to worry about, Growing presence in Australia, would be on my short list

Hybris - Just purchased by SAP, Again winning some high profile clients. Would also be on my short list, eventually may suffer the same fate as websphere, Good Java dev-ops resources are already $750/day and are hard to get.

Magneto - Half the digital agencies in Australia seems to be claiming a competency in Magneto, watch out for shallow experience. Defiantly the popular pick at the moment. Again good to have on the short list but speed issues and buggy extensions are a minefield for the inexperienced