Why does changing your Magento Partner have to be so painful?
In our experience, taking over the responsibility of DevOps and deployments, is the single most significant cost and pain-point when merchants change agency partner. This often leads to troublesome migrations and everyone suffers, most commonly the Magento platform itself. The worst thing you can feel as a merchant, is 'stuck' with your current agency through fear of endless headaches and business impact. Our whole service and ethos is around removing this once and for all.
One of the most difficult areas of platform TCO is around the inconsistency of DevOps practices. Agencies tend to see their DevOps as their IP and want to retain/protect it. MDOQ was setup to answer this pain point and extract the tie-in of DevOps so that merchants can gain agency independence and shop around for the best service. Contracting out your Dev Ops separately is essentially like subscribing (in part) to the SaaS model. You are contracting an independent company to provide a process of getting code live and wrapping an independent set of DevOps practices around it that will allow multiple agencies to supply services in a more frictionless approach. This empowers your Magento Open Source platform inline with the cultural values that yielded it as the first true global Open Source Ecommerce platform. If the same culture of modularisation and extensibility, can be extended to the software development lifecycle process and SI’s can work in harmony on the same projects, then this is a big win for Magento and the merchants.
2 scenarios;
- Merchant A wishes to have a small contract developer company overseas delivering some custom modules, but also has an SI partner supporting them with training, SLA and platform support. Seldom do you see the 2 relationships existing harmoniously, in fact its commonly a tit-for-tat blame game on who caused an issue if something didn’t go to plan. It’s often the case that inconsistent DevOps practices are the true root of issues and therefore removing this factor, can improve the merchants ability to move more freely and employ services from different providers without having to ‘move agency’.
- Merchant B overall has a great services from a key SI partner considered a 360-service agency, however they lack some of the industry expertise that they desire around technical SEO. Again, friction and difficulties arise with the 2 providers unable to work in harmony and thus, both client and platform fail in delivering the objectives. The DevOps culture belongs to the key SI and they refuse to honour their SLA if there are other agencies providing services.
There are endless variations of the above situations and its usually the focal-point when merchants are shopping around looking to change their partnership.
The notion of merchant-agency relationships seems monogamous. This seems to be because of the steep costs and risks associated with changing partner. That risk of change can be identified and managed, so that the merchant is free to stop, start and change relationships more freely and (dare I say it) in parrallel, thus managing both risk and cost. This creates freedom that we see and feel with our customers.
Why does changing your Magento Partner have to be so painful?
In our experience, taking over the responsibility of DevOps and deployments, is the single most significant cost and pain-point when merchants change agency partner. This often leads to troublesome migrations and everyone suffers, most commonly the Magento platform itself. The worst thing you can feel as a merchant, is 'stuck' with your current agency through fear of endless headaches and business impact. Our whole service and ethos is around removing this once and for all.
One of the most difficult areas of platform TCO is around the inconsistency of DevOps practices. Agencies tend to see their DevOps as their IP and want to retain/protect it. MDOQ was setup to answer this pain point and extract the tie-in of DevOps so that merchants can gain agency independence and shop around for the best service. Contracting out your Dev Ops separately is essentially like subscribing (in part) to the SaaS model. You are contracting an independent company to provide a process of getting code live and wrapping an independent set of DevOps practices around it that will allow multiple agencies to supply services in a more frictionless approach. This empowers your Magento Open Source platform inline with the cultural values that yielded it as the first true global Open Source Ecommerce platform. If the same culture of modularisation and extensibility, can be extended to the software development lifecycle process and SI’s can work in harmony on the same projects, then this is a big win for Magento and the merchants.
2 scenarios;
- Merchant A wishes to have a small contract developer company overseas delivering some custom modules, but also has an SI partner supporting them with training, SLA and platform support. Seldom do you see the 2 relationships existing harmoniously, in fact its commonly a tit-for-tat blame game on who caused an issue if something didn’t go to plan. It’s often the case that inconsistent DevOps practices are the true root of issues and therefore removing this factor, can improve the merchants ability to move more freely and employ services from different providers without having to ‘move agency’.
- Merchant B overall has a great services from a key SI partner considered a 360-service agency, however they lack some of the industry expertise that they desire around technical SEO. Again, friction and difficulties arise with the 2 providers unable to work in harmony and thus, both client and platform fail in delivering the objectives. The DevOps culture belongs to the key SI and they refuse to honour their SLA if there are other agencies providing services.
There are endless variations of the above situations and its usually the focal-point when merchants are shopping around looking to change their partnership.
The notion of merchant-agency relationships seems monogamous. This seems to be because of the steep costs and risks associated with changing partner. That risk of change can be identified and managed, so that the merchant is free to stop, start and change relationships more freely and (dare I say it) in parrallel, thus managing both risk and cost. This creates freedom that we see and feel with our customers.