Bounteous + Akeneo: Two Years In Partnership
In December 2020, we hit the two-year anniversary of our partnership with Akeneo and it seemed like a good time to profile why we still choose Akeneo after two years of partnership.
Bounteous opportunistically got started with Akeneo in December 2018. With an evolving Data Management practice, we were actively seeking strategic product information management (PIM) partnerships. Through a large client project, we engaged with Akeneo PIM and seized the opportunity to learn more about the solution.
As we got to know Akeneo PIM through this hands-on approach, we quickly came to understand the strengths and capabilities of the platform, and realized that the Akeneo PIM would be a strategic addition to our partner ecosystem.
Two years and several projects later, the initial impression holds true. Akeneo continues to be a strong partner, providing our clients with an exceptional PIM solution that drives results. Let’s look at some of the reasons why we partner with Akeneo and why they are still a critical component of our growing Data Management/PIM practice.
Akeneo is Built on Open Source
This may be just my personal soft spot. Coming from an engineering foundation, I appreciate the fact that Akeneo remains open source. This means we’re able to make whatever modifications we need and extend the platform in ways the original developers could never have imagined as well as benefit from the entire development community’s extensions and modifications to the platform.
This coupled with PHP as its language makes the platform especially attractive since PHP developers are widely available and the skills needed generally are common across other platforms in a company’s martech stack: Commerce (Magento, Shopify, BigCommerce, etc.), CMS (Drupal, AEM, WordPress, etc.), etc.
User Experience
Akeneo has a great user experience. Of all the PIMs we’ve encountered on projects and in our own platform evaluations, Akeneo has the most accessible UI, which greatly lowers the learning curve to becoming productive within the platform.
Strong Data Governance
Data Governance and Data Modeling are the bones of any great PIM. Without them, you lose control of your data and have difficulty establishing and maintaining high-quality product information, a core reason for implementing a PIM.
PIM vendors take many different approaches here. Akeneo strikes a good balance of mandatory controls and flexibility to provide a strong foundation for most organizations.
Flexible Architecture
Many PIM platforms are starting to enable increasing levels of API support. Akeneo has almost taken a strategic push to be "API first," which allows for simpler integrations and more decoupled enhancements able to ultimately support more resilient extensions that are feature-rich and much easier to maintain over time.
Strong Vision
Akeneo has become a champion of PXM (Product Experience Management), where a PIM is tightly coupled with other experience platforms (CMS, CDP, etc.). They view PXM as the logical next level for delivering superior product experiences.
As such, they are investing in providing Akeneo customers with new platform features and capabilities as well as industry guidance and thought leadership to support organizations that wish to continue on their PXM journey.
Great Culture
Akeneo has a great team! Over the last few years, we’ve gotten to know their organization from their CEO on down. We’ve seen their commitment to ensuring the success of every one of their customers and Akeneo implementation projects.
Great Partnership
One way to understand the values of an organization is to see how they treat their partners. Akeneo has been proactive and highly supportive. We meet frequently and they provide whatever support we need.
In addition, we’re asked for platform feedback—what’s the good, bad, and the ugly of the platform, and what changes they can make to better engage partners and their clients.
A Continued Strategic Partnership to Drive Client Success
At Bounteous, working with platform partners is a part of our everyday life. On engagements with clients, partners often provide key components of the solutions we create. To help our clients be successful, it’s critical to develop effective partnerships, and together with Akeneo, we’re able to solve both technical and organizational challenges that can plague typical PIM products.
