Gartner highlights the strengths of IBM’s WebSphere Commerce platform
To stay on top of the eCommerce game, webstore owners will need to hone their skills in the upcoming years. They'll have to go to market more aggressively than ever before – and especially so as more competitors enter the online playing field.
To help eCommerce practitioners better prepare for the year ahead, Gartner, the world's leading information technology research agency, studied the key technical, organizational and go-to-market challenges they will face. With its findings, Gartner then created a guide aimed at evaluating the growing number of vendor solutions available, including IBM’s WebSphere Commerce.
“IBM WebSphere Commerce is a Leader in this year's Magic Quadrant, based on the scalability and product breadth of WebSphere Commerce, on the IBM Smarter Commerce vision for e-commerce, on support for B2C and B2B business models in global enterprise-scale organizations, and on IBM's ecosystem of solution and consulting partners,” Gartner reported. To support that bold statement, Gartner highlighted the main strengths delivered by the WebSphere Commerce platform. They are as follows:
- WebSphere Commerce is an enterprise e-commerce product that provides scalability and flexibility, and is used in B2C (approximately 75% of deployments) and B2B (25% of deployments) organizations. More than 60% of WebSphere Commerce customers generate more than $100 million in total revenue, underscoring WebSphere Commerce as a product for very large organizations. WebSphere Commerce supports 13 languages and multiple currencies, subsites developed for subsidiary or division e-commerce stores, order management, analytics and reporting, and merchandising. It also has native support for iOS and Android devices, as well as integration with social sites.
- WebSphere Commerce is able to leverage recent acquisitions — including Coremetrics, DemandTec, Sterling Commerce and Unica — that form IBM's Smarter Commerce offering, as well as IBM Global Services and the company's global sales and support presence. Twenty-five percent of the IBM customers surveyed regard WebSphere Commerce as providing "transformational" business benefits to their organizations, highlighting the strategic contribution of these assets.
- WebSphere Commerce is used by companies in consumer goods, healthcare, high tech, business services and retail. References gave high marks for product and technology vision, product functionality and product manageability, although less positive scores for ease of upgrading and integration with non-IBM applications, such as Microsoft Office applications.
So as technology advances, the number of vendors to choose from increases. Therefore, Gartner’s research should prove useful to forward-thinking online retailers looking to replatform their sites and ultimately enhance their competitive edge.
To include WebSphere Commerce into your company’s growth plan, reach out to the team at NetSphere Strategies. We have years of experience working with the platform and would be honored to guide you through an implementation.
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