How to Become a Market Leader in Enterprise Commerce Technology

Today we reached a huge milestone at commercetools, the company that I co-founded late 2006 and run as its CEO ever since. After we had been recognized in 2017 for the first time in the Forrester Wave? for B2C Commerce Suites we achieved another big win this week when we entered (for the first time) the 2018 Gartner Magic Quadrant?for Digital Commerce (you can download the full report for free here). For us the greatest news is not only that we made it into this exclusive circle of the globally most relevant commerce technologies but we even entered as a visionary.

The overall vision and ambition runs like a current thread through all our moves we made since we settled the company and started to write the first lines of code: By providing a better and different enterprise commerce platform that focuses on the challenges and demands of businesses today and tomorrow we grow and mature to leading provider in our industry. By helping companies to face and overcome their biggest threats - fast moving digital native competition, sky-high customer demands and a fast changing world of touchpoints and user behaviour - we engraved the answers to these requirements into the foundation of our product and the company.

The idea was simple.What we did was that we stepped backed and looked at the (e)Commerce world. All software out there was built to launch webshops. Some had been frameworks and where made to be customized while others focused on templates and a quick go-live. Some where built on JAVA, others on PHP or .NET. Non of those (in the mid-market and enterprise) where really SaaS and definitely not cloud-native. That was the status-quo. In late 2010.

At the same time the Wired Magazine had a great article written by their editor-in-chief Chris Anderson:

The Web is dead. Long live the Internet.

You can read the full article online here. Basically what it said was that internet traffic consumption is shifting rapidly from desktop computers to mobile devices and embedded systems due to a dramatic change both in the landscape of technologies/devices and a fast adoption at the consumer. It described perfectly what we felt was the status-quo in digital commerce.

So what would you do? In a world where new touchpoints pop up like mushrooms, the desktop is getting deprecated, your competition is bringing out a new release every second (!) - how could you really respond with a run-of-the-mill webshop? The answer is simple: You can't!

In the world of modern retail a commerce platform must contain the following aspects to be future-ready:

• Cloud-Native: A modern software needs to scale horizontally, automatically support continuous delivery and be designed for failure. (So putting a single-tenant on-premise offering on AWS is definitely NOT cloud.) Modern commerce platforms need a multi-tenant architecture by design to enable cost and resource advantages against on-prem.
• API-First: Everybody today claims to have APIs but in 99% of the cases it's a by-product sitting on a larger stack. At first there seems to be nothing wrong about it until you figure out that your used function xyz does not have an API counterpart. In a world full of devices where mobile is taking the lead and AR/VR/Voice are already getting into the spotlight APIs have to be the core of every software stack, not only in the commerce space.
• Microservices-Ready: Times are over where you use on single monolithic application to serve your needs. As your demands became flexible so needed the solution to be. That means enterprises have to consume and compose different services and even to built some of them on their own to match unique requirements and to create USPs. For a commerce platform that means that product services can be used independently from pricing or cart or inventory management.

This is what we built. As the first ones who did that in Commerce. When we launched in 2013 what today is the gold-standard for almost every large and/or successful retailer was still a niche. You can see the slides we used for the public launch at Exceed conference in March 2013 here. If you want to learn more about our platform just checkout our website or read the article my colleague Kelly just wrote.

So How Did We Get Where We Are Today?

From launching a new product to become a leader in the industry is a long way and beside a great team, strategy and timing you definitely also sometimes need to be lucky. I will not cover in this article how we grew and scaled the company and what challenges you have to face with growth and i18n. If you are interested in the entrepreneurial story please let me know in the comments and I will consider separate posts about it. With now more than 150 employees and offices in Amsterdam, Berlin, Durham, Jena and Munich we just warmed up to get into the tournament. We had an amazing year 2017 with lots of new customers and partners from Latin America, US, Europe and Asia. That customer growth success combined with our unique positioning of being the only enterprise commerce platform on the market that is both cloud-native and API-first has given us the recognition we receive today.

And What Comes Next?

As I already said our overall motivation is to become a market leader of the industry. We have a lot of stuff in our roadmap for 2018/19 that we are already working on. We will continue our strong global growth and most likely add the one or other office in the next 6-9 months (I can't tell you too much here but it's not a secret that we are looking beyond Europe and US already). We continue to grow our support organization to give our customers and partners the best consulting and training that they deserve. We continue to grow our teams everywhere, as fast as possible but always with the focus on our strong corporate culture, the right ambition on doing great things and a high passion for commerce. If you are looking for a job just check our this site.

We are just getting started. I will share from time to time with you a few insights both from an entrepreneurial perspective and also about the company and the market itself.