Yes, of course, Cebit is still running, but we were only there yesterday. For the first time, by the way, the huge stands of Microsoft, Telekom or SAP – which are certainly impressive at well over 1000 square meters – are otherwise not so relevant to us. But since last year, e-commerce topics have been focused in one hall, which was reason enough to stop by for a day.
In fact, numerous providers known in the e-commerce industry then turned up, so it’s worth taking a look who was there and who wasn’t.
In the area of shop systems, you could meet Shopware, XtCommerce, Gambio, Plenty and Magento (with Meet Magento and various agencies), and various ERP systems also offered their own web shops. In this respect, it is almost remarkable that Oxid was missing there – they seem to be concentrating purely on the dmexco. But there was also no sign of Hybris or Intershop, although this would go well with the big ERP tankers. But if Otto, or even the entire Otto Group, really switches from Intershop to an in-house development this year, Intershop should have other worries anyway and let the red pencil circle…
In the ERP area, there was of course an almost unmanageable number of providers – and of course hardly anyone could be denied the assurance that they were geared towards retail and of course could also map online retail and had even connected customer XY’s web shop. Well, experience has shown that there is a little more to an e-commerce process chain than just pushing items into a web shop and picking up orders In e-commerce, there are numerous other ERP systems that, albeit once introduced for historical reasons, are quite suitable for online trading activities. And there were also some smaller systems that explicitly tried to position themselves as an e-commerce system or as a system that is also suitable for online trading for trading companies with branches.
The complete fraction of the long-established mail order systems was missing from the “usual suspects”. On the other hand, the providers / systems that combine ERP and e-commerce for medium-sized companies were well represented, especially Softengine with an almost double-digit number of system houses was well represented there, but Cateno / büroplus and others also showed the flag, and plentymarkets for the first time. At Sage, on the other hand, I missed 4Sellers and the people from pixi, who usually jump around with their own stand at every trade fair or at least hide out at a partner’s stand, were obviously missing.
Information and results from the numerous discussions with old and new faces will be processed in various articles here on our site in the next few weeks. In this respect, it was an extremely informative day, which should not be without a broader view, at least the other halls were also grazed at a fast pace. Especially in the software area of company organization, project control and ticket system as well as CRM, there was also the opportunity to have more in-depth discussions and to evaluate quite interesting solutions. On the other hand, providers of special e-commerce features or marketing agencies seemed a little disappointed with the response, because sooo many shop operators had not yet been driven to Hanover, but this may still come.
Insofar: Even if 2 x 3.5 hour train journeys plus 8 hours of visiting the trade fair in one day are borderline – it was definitely inspiring and informative. It will be interesting to see how dmexco or Neocom, which has been repositioned this year, will present themselves as counterparts to our core topics.
This entry was posted on 7. März 2013 at 17:58 and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.