For Magento, the new partnership program will enforce quality across its ecosystem
While open source ecommerce platform Magento has been working with web hosts for years, it only launched its official web hosting partner program this week.
On Tuesday, Magento unveiled the specifics of its hosting partner program, and announced its initial platinum partners including Nexcess, Peer 1 and Simple Helix.
For Magento, the new program will enforce quality across its ecosystem, and ensure retailers get the best possible experience with their Magento hosting provider.
Jeff King, senior director of platform partnerships at eBay, tells the WHIR in a phone interview that the idea for an official Magento hosting partner program has been around for a while, and has been in talks for several months.
“Quality of the platform, quality of the system integrator partners and quality of the ecosystem is really a huge focus of what Magento is working on now,” King says. “This is just a reflection on that focus on quality across the ecosystem.”
King says partners like Peer 1 Hosting are a “great example of why we created the program.”
“We want to make sure that when you’re deploying Magento, you’re deploying it in a place that is optimized for the best experience in commerce,” he says. “We’ve seen through experience that people working with [our platinum parnters] are more successful than people who don’t.”
Acquired by eBay in June 2011, open source ecommerce platform Magento now serves more than 110,000 websites worldwide, and is seeing larger merchants on the platform growing to millions of dollars in commerce a year.
“Magento was already growing wildly before eBay purchased it and we’re just feeding oxygen to that ecosystem in any way we can,” King says. “eBay Inc is making a huge bet on being a provider of commerce solutions long term and Magento is a key part of that strategy.”
The partner program is actively looking for new web hosting partners, but King says Magento is currently working thorugh the “enormous backlog of people interested.”
“We’ve had a huge amount of demand for this program,” King says. “Really what we’re ensuring is that only really high quality guys get into the program and make sure that people are follwing Magento best practices for hosting. There’s a number of not only technical, but also support and other kinds of requirements that we’re asking them to do before they qualify to enter the program.”
Currently, there are between “dozens and hundreds of hosting providers that offer Magento,” according to King, a number that is hard to pinpoint since Magento is an open source software that is deployed all over the world.
“We really think it makes sense to consolidate the market a bit and focus on quality in commerce,” he says. “With Magento, the only thing we’re looking to long term is we want a high class environment for developers to extend the product, we want world-class integration into eBay and PayPal, so there are a lot of these things that I think will naturally consolidate around some really high quality providers.”
Being part of the Magento web hosting partner program is really about specialization, and providing something to retailers that goes above and beyond what other hosts in the industry can offer, King explains.
“Ecommerce and commerce in general is growing like crazy. This is a hugely important business for anyone in the hosting industry,” King says.
About Nicole Henderson
Nicole Henderson writes full-time for the Web Host Industry Review where she covers daily news and features online, as well as in print. She has a bachelor of journalism from Ryerson University in Toronto, and has been writing for the WHIR since September 2010. You can find her on Twitter @NicoleHenderson.
