Waiting for Akeneo – when will the first real open source PIM arrive?

If you are implementing medium to large web projects with open source software, you are actually very well served. There are good e-commerce systems (Oxid, Magento, Shopware etc.) and also good content management systems (TYPO3, Drupal, Magnolia etc.). However, when it comes to managing product data, e.g. importing it from ERP systems, manually aggregating it and outputting it to various channels, things have been rather poor so far. These PIM systems have somehow not really found their way into the open source world. In fact, none of the solutions have really been able to establish themselves in such a way that they are used on a broad basis.

There were/are approaches again and again. E.g.

PimCore
PimCore(www.pimcore.org) is a Zend-based product management framework and was, for a time, the hope for most major open source service providers. After first becoming known, however, the agency behind Pimcore,“elements.at New Media Solutions GmbH“, got a little bogged down and now the framework is also a content management system, as if there wasn’t enough. For a moment, it looked as if elements.at was building a product like Varien back then. Apparently they didn’t quite make the grade, Pimcore is still being developed and maintained, but it is far from making the breakthrough.

PimSource
PimSource is an “advance” from the people who built Razuna(OpenSource DAM). They describe the “Case for an enterprise open source PIM” very nicely:

The last couple of years, everyone who needed to manage products for a store, be it for an e-commerce site, book store or a retail store in general, has probably run into redundant product data. That is, the products are already in “one system”, but can not be exported in the needed format or are available in some sort of “silo” system. Additionally, you most likely had your experiences, or shall we say frustrations, with product data images, right? Once you “somehow” managed to get your data out and across to your “other” system (e-commerce store, ERP, etc.) you again were faced with importing them in the right format.

We’ve all been there and we’ve all experienced the pain. Now, imagine your business depends on this workflow. So much, that any failure will cost your organization hard earned money. This is, when you start realizing that a centralized solution for storing all your product data, images and advertisement management, in short product collation, is the solution for your pain.

So far so good. Unfortunately, this blog post, which is over a year old, was not followed by anything else. And I doubt that anything more will come of it.

The new hope: akeneo
The situation is completely different for a player that was founded last year: akeneo. It looks as if these people will manage to launch a product that has the potential to make a breakthrough. Why should we be optimistic?

1. The venture was founded by experienced people. Frederic de Gombert and Benoit Jacquemont previously held management positions at smile and bring with them a wealth of project experience.
2. Yoav Kutner, former CTO and co-founder of Magento, is listed as a consultant. So he has already launched a major open source product.
3. The people at akeneo will probably have the right funding to take the venture further.

In technical terms, akaneo will be based on the Oro platform, which was launched by Yoav Kutner’s new company. This so-called business application platform allows individual applications to be developed quickly.

Impact?
The impact on the e-business world will probably be quite big. Where hybris is always a few points ahead in tenders today, they will face a lot of competition, provided that akeneo can really be integrated with leading store systems easily and as seamlessly as possible. I have often lost tenders to hybris simply because hybris has a (good) PIM or everything is built around it. A good open source PIM closes a long overdue gap in the range of open source enterprise web applications and is probably one of the most important.