I’ve been in several meetings with Varien this week, and one of the topics that has come up has been the new editions of Magento: Professional and Mobile. The meetings have helped me to understand what’s going on more clearly, so I’m going to try to explain it at a top level in this article.
Varien are developing a segmented offering for all shapes and sizes of eCommerce business, and the Professional edition fills an important gap in that offering. In summary:
- Community is for cost-conscious retailers with low budgets who aren’t concerned about vendor liability or support if their software has problems.
- Professional has more features and a warranty, and will be PCI compliant later this year. It’s for retailers whose incomes significantly depend on their websites, but who aren’t yet in the large online category.
- Enterprise is for big retailers and for people who need enterprise specific features like a content staging set-up for multiple versions of their website.
Community Edition will continue as a fully open sourced, free of charge edition for small businesses that are new to eCommerce, and don’t have the budget for a commercial product. It will remain a driver for serious eCommerce innovation, and companies like Pod1 will continue to support it by contributing modules like our Sagepay community module. There are no comebacks if there are problems with the Community Edition, though: Varien won’t actively support issues with it (Pod1 supports its clients who use it, of course) and there is no warranty for problems that cost the retailer money.
The Professional Edition is a new licensed edition, costing just short of $3,000, which comes with support and a warranty, and is based on the same core version of Magento as the Enterprise Edition. It even has some of the functionality of the Enterprise Edition, like gift cards. It’s missing some of the other features, and it would seem that some of the performance enhancements are going to be in Enterprise but not Professional. With the superior Varien support offered for Enterprise Edition, it’s still going to be the version that most big eCommerce businesses choose.
Both Professional and Enterprise will have one important element, once Varien have completed the relevant audits: they will be PA-DSS certified, an essential for any retailer whose bank is telling them they need to become PCI compliant. If your eCommerce application is PA-DSS compliant, it saves lots of headaches in any PCI audit you have to go through, so this will be important for retailers doing more than a few hundred orders per month.
Enterprise will always have the most advanced features and performance, and a 24 hour support offering from Varien, if that’s important to you. The starting price is just under $10,000, and it seems Enterprise is also aimed at multi-server retailers, where Professional users probably only have 1 web-server: I’m saying this because of the way the developer license is bundled differently with the 2 editions, so I may be mistaken.
It also seems that Varien will distribute Professional exclusively through re-sellers and not sell it themselves, whereas Enterprise can be bought through re-sellers or direct from Varien.
Pod1 is switching to recommending Professional Edition for all its clients going forwards, once we’re happy that the first version is stable and robust enough for production use, which we don’t expect to be an issue, of course.
Magento Mobile Edition
Very recently Varien have also launched their first mobile edition, which is an iPhone application that will offer full native eCommerce functionality to anyone with a Magento site. It sounds like this makes extensive use of the Magento web-service APIs, which allow remote applications to access and update Magento, and we’re really looking forward to seeing it in action. I hear iPad and Android applications are not far behind the iPhone application.
Of course the iPhone remains a minority handset for a small group, but it’s an important and news-worthy group, and we’re watching this development with interest. At the same time, Pod1 is starting to implement mobile themes that work in mobile phone browsers, rather than as native applications, working with our partners Fontera, who are located in Cape Town and help us to run our operation in South Africa.
These announcements are very exciting for Pod1, and we’re really pleased with the way that Varien is taking the Magento platform. More exciting announcements are coming, but I can’t mention those just yet.
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