Lee Bolding’s comment in the Magento certification discussion on Linkedin was too spot on to not repost:
…Certification would even the playing field a little – I see large agencies, with big clients and deep pockets, with no technical Magento skills, yet (somehow) they’re Enterprise partners. I see small outfits – just a few guys – with wizard Magento skills, but no exposure to either (Magento) Enterprise or larger clients. The end result is that large enterprise clients lose confidence, believing that the larger, non-skilled agencies are “the best of the best” (they MUST be, they’re partners!) whilst the smaller companies (with the wizards) fight to survive because they’re deemed to be unskilled (otherwise, they’d be partners).
Lee is right. Since I’ve talked with him a few times, I’m hoping that he is grouping Elias under that smaller “wizard” company label. We endeavor to do good work. We build complex extensions for Magento. And, quite frankly, we get hammered as a business on our bottom line. No joke. The thought of leaving Magento all together crosses my mind at least once a week. This consideration is fueled by conversations with agencies who make a killing off of other webwork that is, well, easy when compared to Magento.
Our best client in 2009 was an agency. They love us. They now hate Magento. So they stopped selling ecommerce projects to their clients because it was a pain in their butt. Building “regular” websites was more profitable. This is becoming increasingly common as developers forego the Magento learning curve in favor of easier wins.
Or is it a US thing? Magento isn’t as big here in the states as it is in Europe. A client told me that he estimates that there are maybe half a dozen firms in the US who are highly specialized experts in Magento. I know a Mage firm who bought a skype number for the UK and gets 2-3 calls/day from what seem to be higher end clients in Europe. Our module sales are stronger in France than in our own country, which might not be a bad thing since the dollar’s value seems to be deteriorating. We’re currently considering adding another storefront to our module store that is Europe specific to see what impact it has on sales across the pond.
Right now Magento feels like a mediocre hand in poker. Do you bluff your way through it or fold and cut your loses? Would forking over $5k to Varien to slap a professional partner sticker on the site draw in good clients who value Mage services enough to pay handsomely for them? I like Varien. I’m impressed after my conversations with Tim Schultz. I think Roy Rubin is brilliant. But can they create an ecosystem that provides a return on the investments from developers in the community? Jury is still out.
Hi Josh – yes, between you, me and whoever else is reading this, it was you guys I was thinking of when I wrote that 😉
Let’s see how it pans out… at the moment, my feelings are that we’ve heard this song and seen this dance before – Certification was to be a requirement for Enterprise partnership. It never happened, and so has damaged the value of the Enterprise partnership (for the reasons I mentioned), and ultimately hurt the Magento brand.
Varien need to get it right this time – getting it wrong again could catastrophically damage their reputation, regardless of which clients are already using Magento
In all fairness, I don’t envy Varien’s juggling act. They have a lot of stakeholders to account for in their decisions: big retailers, enterprise partners, smaller community developers, module developers, complimentary product partners (Rackspace, paypal, etc…), new VC investors, and I’m sure the list goes on.
It seems like the communities that cater to developers work themselves out with the end customer. Think codeignitor or wordpress. Developers create thriving businesses off of these communities which in turn service the demands of end users. These communities thrive, IMO, largely due to accessible (read well-documented) code. Get the fundamentals correct and many other problems wil work themselves out in the market.
Varien sort of approached this in reverse by doing a masterful job of building credibility with the end users (retailers) and is now backtracking to figure out how to cultivate the development community.
Wow Lee could not be more right with that statement. We run in to this all the time. We just had an agency come to us to help them with an Enterprise version because it wasn’t working right. But they have questioned us because we have yet done or really needed to install a enterprise version. We fixed most of the issues over the phone and rest with in a day. We run in to the issue all the time.