Sometimes I'm just wondering around online, try some stuff here and there and most of the time nothing happens. But sometimes things do happen. Today I discovered a new project from Magento Inc...
What is it? This is what the FAQ says about the project:
Project Stratus is Magento's next-generation on-demand eCommerce platform. At its core, Stratus is an online version of our award-winning eCommerce platform. Everything you already know and love about the Magento platform is available with this hosted service. Stratus creates more choice for merchants to select the product and platform that best fits their needs. Stratus will empower merchants and developers to customize, modify, extend and integrate a hosted store as if it were their own code running on their own servers ... an unprecedented capability in the market today.
If you go to stratus.magento.com you'll see the landing page for the cloud service that Magento Inc. is working on. You can subscribe to newsletter updates, enter an invite key and request one.
The beta program will run into "early 2011". I don't know how many invites they're going to accept so I immediately applied for an invite and I'd suggest you do the same. I'll keep you posted when the invite gets accepted.
Of course there are more questions then answers at this time, but I think an official cloud service for Magento will be a really cool and logical addition to the Magento product portfolio! Following their relationship with Rackspace, I'd suspect that Project Stratus will run on their servers.
Since I can't find any mentions from Magento Inc. about this Project Stratus it think this might me still a little bit of a secret project, so don't tell them you got it from me ok...? :)
Most of my content is published on LinkedIn, so make sure to follow me there!
Recently I've seen some (often absolute) statements going around, generally in the line of "open source commerce platforms are a terrible idea". Now of course different solutions always have different pros and cons.
A hierarchy of evidence (or levels of evidence) is a heuristic used to rank the relative strength of results obtained from scientific research. I've created a version of this chart/pyramid applied to CRO which you can see below. It contains the options we have as optimizers and tools and methods we often use to gather data.