Optaros Switzerland and Magento

Optaros is the first Magento worldwide partner active in Switzerland!

With offices located in Germany, Switzerland (Geneva, Lausanne, Bern, Zurich), the United Kingdom and the United States, Optaros offers retailers access to the best in open source for their ecommerce planning (http://www.optaros.com/campaigns/2009-social-ecommerce-planning-guide) needs. This enterprise partnership enables Optaros to provide assembled ecommerce solutions (http://www.optaros.com/solutions/ecommerce-solutions) to its clients using the Magento Enterprise Edition eCommerce platform.

The partnership announcement by Magento.

OCentric and Blogs

Blogs allow to drive organic search traffic since keywords and page titles can be easily optimized for product names for search. Unfortunately most Brands are not using blogs to drive traffic, and if they are they are not treating each blog permalink page as a landing page that should drive to conversions.

OCentric allows creation of search engine optimized (SEO) blogs with product detail information of the associated product on the same page.

OCentric is an eCommerce solution provided by Optaros Switzerland (Geneva, Lausanne, Bern Zurich)

Alfresco and Drupal for your Intranet - Webinar

Optaros and Alfresco will present a Webinar on September 15 presenting how you can transform your intranet by integrating Drupal and Alfresco.

Your intranet will become a corporate commmunication tool as well as an engaging community platform, and a rock-solid document repository.

Optaros content management experts Chris Fuller and Jeff Potts will discuss how a game publisher was able to save time and money by leveraging open source for their intranet.



You’ll learn valuable insights that will help you take your Enterprise collaboration to the next level.

Register here

eCommerce on the Cloud

Doing some cloud hosting an eCommerce solution seams a very interesting solution to cope with traffic peaks like you might have during Christmas season.
Optaros has done some performance testing Magento (Open Source Ecommerce Solution) in the Amazon EC2.

The optimal cloud environment setup for our tests was:

• 1 Load balancer – HAProxy on 1 small EC2 instance
• 1 Database – MySQL on 1 small EC2 instance. We have MySQL replication running, but we did not seem to need it as the database was not the bottleneck.
• 2 - 4 Magento servers – Medium version of High CPU On-Demand Instances which are 1.7 GB of memory, 5 EC2 Compute Units (2 virtual cores with 2.5 EC2 Compute Units each). Number of servers is the only variable in the test results.

The Test Results:

- Home page test

• 2 Medium version of High CPU Machines in pool for Magento 125 Threads, 25 loops – 5157ms mean response time serving 23.7 req/s
• 4 Medium version of High CPU Machines in pool 500 Threads, 25 loops – 8672ms mean response time serving 47.5 req/s

- Add To Cart test

• 1 Medium version of High CPU Machine in pool 60 Threads, 2 loops – 5069ms mean response time serving 6 req/s
• 2 Medium version of High CPU Machines in pool 80 Threads, 10 loops – 2206ms mean response time serving 14.1 req/s

Some General Findings:

• Both homepage and add to cart scenarios scale roughly linearly.
• The Add To Cart performed 40% slower than the highly cached homepage test scenario.
• Serving Magento PHP files is primarily a CPU bound task, thus a high CPU machine is more effective than a standard large instance. (4 High CPU machines outperform 4 standard large machines at half the cost)
• Upgrading the hardware for the MySQL, memcache, and load balancer machines did not help performance numbers at this level of load.
• A single XL machine was able to serve 37.1 req per second when Jmeter was also placed on a XL instance -- there definitely seems to be solid IO advantages to using an instance rated “high IO”.
• The actual usable level of CPU and memory on a small instance is very limited and should probably never be used for production.
• Magento could probably be optimized further to gain additional performance including using a memory filesystem, further gzip/deflate, css/js minimization, etc.

Yes it seems that Magento can scale on Amazon EC2. Of course some additional questions have to be addresses as PCI compliance and data confidentiality.

If you are interested by this subject you should contact kflieger@optaros.com (Switzerland eCommerce expert and Magento Partner)

It is time to use social networking to reach customers

Services, such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and countless other websites, have had a profound effect on how millions of people — especially those under 35 — interact with others (or don't), shop and view brands.

Some statistics to justify your Social-media strategies:

• Facebook: More than 10,000 websites use Facebook Connect, a service that lets Facebook users log in to affiliated sites using their Facebook account and share information from those sites with their Facebook friends. About 30 million Facebook members access it through mobile devices.
• Twitter: Twitter users spend 66% more dollars on the Internet than non-Twitter users, says market researcher ComScore.
• MySpace: More than 1 million small businesses and individuals promote their goods and services on MySpace.
• LinkedIn: LinkedIn has more than 365,000 company profiles. More than 12 million small-business professionals are members of LinkedIn.

Forrester states "the time to build social marketing applications is now". Social technologies continue to grow in 2009. Now more than four in five US online adults use social media at least once a month, and half participate in social networks like Facebook. While young people continue to march toward almost universal adoption of social applications, the most rapid growth occurred among consumers 35 and older. This means the time to build social marketing applications is now.

Do not wait otherwise it might be to late!

Illustration of Assembled Web

How Assembled Web can be explained on a real life example by Nikki Baird.

Today a manufacturer is definitely expected to have detailed information about all of the products it proposes. But depending on the product category they're in, they might also need to provide a community - a place for people to engage and create content about the lifestyle the brand supports (as opposed to just the products that they sell). In addition the brand may decide that selling a limited selection of products - or even the whole catalog - may provide valuable information in convincing retailers to stock a broader assortment of the brand's wares. Therefore manufacturers may approach their online presence from a strength in content, but eventually need to support community and commerce.

On the other side, retailers have commerce down pretty well, but feel they need to do much more around content and community.

The full article on RSR.

Assembled Web and Content Syndication

Optaros (Switzerland) provides with OView an Content and Application Syndication Software that enables companies to place rich media content and applications on 3rd party sites and devices and centrally manage them as if they were on their own sites. For many enterprise applications, OView is a superior choice to widget platforms, microsites or ad networks.

There are two components to OView. The first component is the Application View which is the actual application to be placed on desired websites. The second component is the Syndication Service that provides all the necessary supporting capabilities to enable successful Application Syndication.

Read more on www.optaros.com