15/10/2013

Interview : Akeneo, an ergonomic and extendable PIM solution for cross-channel retailers

The beta version of Akeneo, PIM (Product Information Management), was recently released. This is an interview about the software, its features, its strengths, projects, its added value compared to the competition... with Frederick Gombert, co-founder and CEO of the publishing company, also named Akeneo.

How would you define your product?
It is a PIM, a tool for merchants wishing to centralise all of their information products in one same area. Akeneo allows product data to be collected from different sources and thus different formats (ERP, database providers, Excel), to be classified and enriched. It is also possible to translate these data products from a management interface, to quality control them and then to export them to various sales channels (e-commerce site, mobile application, paper catalogue ...).

What is your added value compared to your competitors, including the open source PIM Pimcore?
Pimcore is a versatile and excellent CMS solution. However, as a PIM it is not very effective in relation to ergonomics and ease of use. Akeneo, in contrast, is designed to be used by employees with a non-technical profile.

Can you tell us more precisely how you designed your solution?
We designed Akeneo with customer needs directly in mind, which we have collected through workshops with two major players in the field of luxury and furniture (Fournier group).

On the technical side of things, what strength does your solution have?
Firstly Akeneo has the advantage of using the widespread PHP language, and, secondly, it is very close to the Symfony 2 framework. A widely used framework which facilitates the growing competence of the developers using our tool and the development of connections with third-party tools.
In addition, our solution is based on OroPlatform, a platform common to Akeneo and OroCRM and leveraging the Symfony 2 framework [editor’s note : the co-founder and technical director of Oro Inc., Yoav Kutner, also co-founder and former technical director of Magento, participated in the creation of Akeneo]. OroPlatform is an application platform whose goal is to facilitate rapid development of applications, which will help to stimulate the development of a community.

So do you plan on developing a community around Akeneo? What do you have planned with this goal in mind?
Our goal is to create a community to implement and develop extensions to create connections between Akeneo and third-party software (ERP in particular). Thus, the solution will be the centre of an ecosystem.
To create a dynamic in this sense, we provide a detailed documentation of the solution for developers (Developer Guide). We also plan to create a marketplace where developers disseminate and share extensions, which can also be graded.

What is the profile of target customers?
Our typical customer is a cross-channel distributor, that is to say, having both a physical network and a platform for e-commerce, which is often set up later on. This type of customer is aware of a need to centralise work so that the physical network teams and the e-commerce teams do not perform the same tasks of gathering information for each product in turn for distribution on different channels.
Akeneo also adapts to the needs of another type of profile: pure players who either have a large volume of products and a complex catalogue or have multiple input (suppliers) or output (distributors) channels.

You recently made ​​a significant amount of money fund-raising?
Yes, Kima Ventures (investment funds belonging to Xavier Niel, founder of Free) and Nestadio Capital recently invested in Akeneo, amounting to 350 000 Euros in total.

Discover the beta version of Akeneo.

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