Akeneo

Akeneo is a technology partner that offers a modern Product Information Management system (PIM system). In a commerce system architecture, a PIM solution provides a place to collect, manage and enrich product information, build a product catalog and distribute it to sales and e-commerce channels. Akeneo offers its product as SaaS, in other words as a cloud solution. Fittingly, Akeneo itself calls its solution the "Product Cloud".

Akeneo's company headquarters is in France; in day-to-day business we work with the German GmbH based in Düsseldorf.

We have been an Akeneo partner since 2020. In the first year of our collaboration, the focus was on professional exchange and onboarding our consultants, so they could get to know the system and its possibilities and explore how it could be used in the system architectures we develop. Since the end of 2020, we have also been taking on implementation projects.

As an implementer of commerce solutions, we take a long-term approach and grow together with our few clients. We therefore depend on their success. Success in online retail correlates strongly with the quality of product data and data models. That is why first-class product data management is essential to the success of our solutions, and we want to actively help shape it.

Akeneo is a member of the MACH Alliance (Microservices, API-driven, Cloud, Headless), which puts it in step with us and fully in tune with the times when it comes to architectural philosophy.

We use Akeneo as our PIM because the cloud solution harmonizes with our best-of-breed strategy, that is, the approach of curating the best specialized solutions via interfaces into a perfectly coordinated system architecture. That works best with native cloud services whose strength lies above all in connectivity. Akeneo offers exactly such a solution and is therefore an important building block for an excellent customer experience, because Akeneo can simply deliver top-quality product data.

In addition, Akeneo takes a progressive approach not only in its technology concept; the user interface and configuration are also very intuitive, and that helps us quickly convince potential clients of the solution and its advantages, because they simply become more independent and can largely manage their own data quality as a result.

Features such as the Rule Engine, tailored import/export, granular rights management or the data quality overview offer immediately tangible added value for our clients and also help us make e-commerce genuinely more successful.

And not least, partner support as well as communication and coordination on implementation projects are very professional, so that we receive all the support we need from the vendor to do a first-class job.

We currently use Akeneo's solution with our clients Sport2000, schuhe.de and S.E.A. Vertrieb. For our client sport2000 we developed an Akeneo connector for the commercetools Headless system in fall 2022.

In total, from 2020 to today, we have implemented 3 e-commerce architectures in which we used the Akeneo Product Cloud as the solution.

The importance of first-class product data is becoming ever clearer to many merchants, and demand for good PIM systems is growing.

In addition, the understanding is also growing that it simply makes sense to use each system component in an architecture exactly where it plays to its strengths: the shop handles checkout, the CRM handles customer data, the ERP handles stock levels, and so on. So we look forward to carrying the MACH approach further together with Akeneo.

At the moment there are still many self-developed solutions on the market where these tasks are handled together, makeshift, in an inflexible system stack. These systems have to be replaced step by step, and when it comes time to optimize product data management, Akeneo's flexible cloud solution will be shortlisted by many IT decision-makers.