Magento Ushers In New Era of Commerce Innovation With Next-Generation Platform

CAMPBELL, CA--(Marketwired - Nov 17, 2015) - Magento Commerce, the leading provider of open omnichannel innovation, today announced the general availability of its next generation open source e-commerce platform, Magento 2.0. On the heels of the recent announcement of Magento Commerce as an independent company, this product release is a significant re-architecture of the industry's leading digital commerce platform.

The new Magento 2.0 platform further builds on its open source heritage, offering unmatched flexibility and extending innovation opportunities for the company's global ecosystem of partners and developers. This empowers brands, merchants and retailers to quickly and cost-effectively deliver engaging omnichannel shopping experiences. Magento 2.0 also enables users to take advantage of the dramatic scale, security and performance improvements in cloud computing.

"This platform release is a foundational milestone that extends Magento's market share and innovation leadership into the next decade," said Mark Lavelle, CEO of Magento Commerce. "It is the platform of the future that our partners and customers can rely on to keep their businesses constantly ahead of the innovation curve, and comfortably ahead of their competitors."

Magento 2.0 features a modern code base and modular architecture that allows for easier customization, faster time to market, and greater deployment flexibility to public or private cloud environments. These enhancements empower merchants with unprecedented business agility: to add channels, product lines, geographies and capabilities faster than any packaged software can.

Consumers today expect convenient, seamless, personalized shopping experiences across all touch points, but the technology required to deliver on these expectations has become increasingly complex, difficult and costly to implement. Many retailers support a number of legacy systems that were never designed to deliver a unified view of the customer across multiple channels. According to Gartner, a typical digital commerce site averages more than 15 integration points with legacy systems and solutions -- with approximately 50 discrete technologies that are necessary to create a complete digital commerce experience¹. Magento's flexible, open platform allows clients to meet these challenges while delivering a consistent and delightful brand experience.

Following a successful beta program, merchants are already experiencing the benefits of this updated platform. "With a production schedule of only eight weeks, we were able to use much of the Magento 2.0 capabilities 'out of the box' to deliver a unique, mobile-optimized, brand experience," said Sean Venturi, founder of Australian beach lifestyle brand Venroy.

"Our customers wanted us to institutionalize what makes Magento great -- the unparalleled flexibility of the world's most powerful open commerce application," said Steve Yankovich, chief product officer at Magento Commerce. "With channels to consumers expanding and expectations for delivery increasing, CMOs wanted deeper integrations with leading omnichannel capabilities, rapid testing and new experiences, while managing business metrics across all channels and product lines. CIOs wanted us to make it easier to provision, secure, maintain and upgrade their Magento platform."

Already the platform of choice among the Internet Retailer Top 1000, Magento 2.0 meets these needs through an enhanced architecture, performance and scalability improvements, and powerful shopper experience functionality. New features of the platform include:

• New platform architecture - Magento 2.0 features easier customization, faster time to market, and greater code quality than ever before. The new architecture includes a modern and updated technology stack, a more modular code base and new service contracts that make it even easier to customize and extend. There is also automated testing for faster, higher-quality deployments and extensive APIs to easily integrate to third-party systems.
• Improved performance and scalability - Magento 2.0 offers higher performance capabilities including faster page load times, as even short delays in accessing a Web page can negatively impact shopper satisfaction and conversion rates. Additionally, large and rapidly growing merchants benefit from the unmatched scalability of Magento 2.0 Enterprise Edition to support enterprise-level site traffic and order volumes as they grow.
• Newer, better shopping experiences - New to Magento 2.0 is fast and easy checkout and an updated responsive design reference theme and blank theme. The new streamlined checkout speeds shoppers through purchase by minimizing steps and required information. The built-in responsive design themes ensure that merchants can deliver a seamless experience across any device in record time, so consumers can shop anytime, anywhere.
• Business agility and productivity improvements - Magento 2.0 offers a new simplified admin user interface, guided product onboarding, customized views and faster import/export capabilities, ensuring that merchants can more efficiently manage product, customer and order information and get the right products into the right customers' hands at the right time. 

In addition, the modular architecture of Magento 2.0 will significantly reduce the effort required for Magento merchants to take future platform upgrades, which Magento is committed to releasing quarterly, starting in Q1 2016.

Beta merchants on Magento 2.0 include SEAT, SOL Lingerie, Venroy, Popcultcha and Alcatel OneTouch. Magento 2.0 has been tested for performance and is positioned to perform and scale seamlessly for retailers across industries and along every step of the business growth cycle. Developers and technology partners from around the world have already developed numerous Magento 2.0 extensions, making key functionality available for all major categories. With the launch of Magento 2.0, merchants already have access to everything they need to run a successful business and many more extensions will be available shortly. For the ecosystem of Magento partners, the firm is providing comprehensive upgrade training, best practices and a full data migration tool to ensure existing Magento merchants have the support and confidence to migrate to the next generation platform starting now.

"E-commerce is a key channel for our overall North America business strategy, and Magento 2.0 is a solution that really covers all our needs," said Liz Pires, executive director of e-commerce, North America for Alcatel OneTouch.

"Expanding our e-commerce capabilities to better serve our customers is key to our business growth here in North America," said Jon Maron, vice president of marketing and communications, North America for Alcatel OneTouch. "With a partner like Magento, we are able to scale our online channel to best meet our customer and portfolio demands while offering the flexibility to grow our offerings in the near and long term."

With the Magento 2.0 release, Magento Commerce is moving to a new, tiered licensing model that will provide more flexibility to clients and align better to their future commerce needs. The new pricing model will go into effect on January 1, 2016.

Both the open source Community Edition and the licensed Enterprise Edition of the Magento 2.0 platform are now available. For more in-depth information on the Community and Enterprise editions, see http://magento.com/products/community-edition and http://magento.com/products/enterprise-edition.

About Magento Commerce
Trusted by more than 250,000 businesses worldwide, Magento Commerce is the leading provider of open omnichannel innovation to retailers, brands and branded manufacturers across retail B2C and B2B industries. In addition to its flagship open source digital commerce platform, Magento Commerce boasts a strong portfolio of cloud-based omnichannel solutions empowering merchants to successfully integrate digital and physical shopping experiences. With over $50B in gross merchandise volume transacted on the platform annually, Magento Commerce is the dominant provider to the Internet Retailer Top 1000, counting more than double the clients to the next closest competitor, and to the Internet Retailer Hot 100. Magento Commerce is supported by a vast global network of solution and technology partners, a highly active global developer community and the largest e-commerce marketplace for extensions available for download on the Magento Marketplace. More information can be found at www.magento.com.

¹ Source: Gartner Digital Commerce Vendor Guide, 2015