The research company Gartner regularly publishes their insights into the key players and products related to the development of digital services. These reports mainly focus on the North American market and, therefore, in Finland these views should be interpreted with some reservations. Trends shown in the reports are, however, something to focus on.
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20 September 2022
The latest four-field analysis of e-commerce solutions, Magic Quadrant for Digital Commerce, was published in August 2022. The report offers some interesting insights. The first thing to note is that those who have led the market in the past are still at the top (leaders). Global giants´, Salesforce, Adobe and SAP, positions in the international e-commerce field remain untouched. They are pretty much always considerable options when larger organizations start thinking about their e-commerce solutions. A solution that differs from the top three is Commercetools, which positions itself next to the giants already two years in a row. Commercetools is fully cloud based and a so-called headless commerce solution, which has been used to implement a few Finnish e-commerce projects, too. Going headless is a hot trend right now so we will see whether more Commercetools web stores will popup in Finland.
From the perspective of the Finnish market, the weakened position of Optimizely (former Episerver) is also interesting. It is now positioned as a niche player. In Finland, Optimizely has long been the leading commercially licenced publishing system. It has also been pretty much the only publishing system based product that has been noted in e-commerce reports. Optimizely recently bought the B2B e-commerce platform Insite Commerce and this product has been slowly introduced to the European market. Considering this, it could be expected that Optimizely would have strengthened its position since the last report, but it has not. Gartner points out Optimizely´s features that go against trends: monolithicity, comprehensiveness, and limitations related to the e-commerce front.
An observation that is less relevant to Finland's current situation, but internationally interesting, is the rise of Oro and Kibo to visionaries. Oro is above all a B2B e-commerce platform but also offers features to work as a marketplace as well as a CRM system. Oro offers a free open source version and a paid SaaS version.
Kibo Commerce is an e-commerce solution based on modern architecture. It offers features for B2C, B2B, Order Management System (OSM), customization, and can be used as a POS (Point-of-Sale) system in stores. Another international researcher, Forrester, mentioned Kibo in their report The Forrester Wave: B2C Commerce Solutions, Q2 2022 as the only leading player.
When it comes to market position, it is also noteworthy that the position of HCL Software has improved and that Intershop has been left out of the report. HCL is developing an e-commerce product formerly known as IBM WebSphere Commerce. The IBM solution had a relatively significant market share in Finland, so it remains to be seen whether HCL can achieve the same. Intershop on the other hand is a capable platform that works well for both B2C and B2B online stores. The platform has been used to implement a few online stores in Finland. As a company, Intershop is much smaller than the global giants it is competing against. The reason for leaving Intershop out might well be that the other companies have taken some of its market share. My own guess is that a larger player might actually buy Intershop sometime in the near future.
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(This article has been translated from the Finnish original. Read the original article.)
