Elastic Path competes with much larger suite vendors in the large enterprise space, and sees the expanded services library combined with their orchestration layer as providing further differentiation for these customers.
Andrej Maihorn, Vice President of Industry Solutions at Elastic Path
Vancouver’s Elastic Path has announced that they have acquired Moltin, a Boston-based competitor in the headless commerce solution space. Moltin’s strength is in microservices, and the increase in Elastic Path’s capabilities here, combined with the legacy Elastic Path orchestration layer, will provide what the company believes will be significant new synergies in the market.
Elastic Path is a smaller company with some very big clients. While they compete in the enterprise commerce solution space with much larger suite providers, they have established a strong market presence in the large enterprise. The key here has been their pioneering role in the creation of the concept of headless commerce, where a content management system [CMS] with an API-first approach is decoupled from the e-commerce system, to manage content without a front-end delivery system. That gives the customer much more choice in customizing their solution, compared to traditional enterprise commerce solutions.
The Moltin acquisition provides additional synergies that strengthens the Elastic Path offering.
“Moltin is a commerce service provider that empowers high growth brands – like us,” said Andrej Maihorn, Vice President of Industry Solutions at Elastic Path. “They are very complementary to us. They have a strong emphasis on microservices, with different services as part of the commerce offering. This allows the delivery of commerce capabilities any way that customers want, and allows them to build a unique consumer experience.”
Elastic Path had microservices capabilities of their own before, but Maihorn said that the additional capabilities that Moltin brings to the table here makes their solution much stronger.
“The joint solution provides the flexibility of microservices to every business,” he stressed. “With other vendors, it can get very complex in stitching them together. We think this creates the industry’s only commerce platform to easily leverage microservices, combining Moltin’s strength in microservices with our API orchestration layer, Cortex.”
Cortex is an API layer across the different business components.
“It enables any customer experience to leverage the business capabilities underneath, and allows us to easily incorporate what they bring to the table,” Maihorn said. “It provides the flexibility to pick and choose the services that you want to use. Elastic Path also provides a library of ready-to-use commerce applications. The combination that the acquisition creates is the next step in managing broad business aspects and providing business agility to use and test new technologies.”
That library of ready-to-use commerce experiences now includes multiple website experiences, a progressive web application (PWA), Alexa Voice Assistant, Facebook chatbot, social login, self-checkout for retail stores, Zendesk customer service, magic mirror, augmented reality, self-checkout for pop-up events, embeddable cart and checkout buy button, and IoT.
Moltin sold to a broader range of customers than Elastic Path, but the core objective is strengthening the enterprise offering rather than broadening out downmarket.
“Elastic Path in the past has targeted enterprises and that won’t change,” Maihorn indicated. “That has been a strong suit. Moltin was slightly different, with a wider range of customers, including some enterprise customers. We will, however, be able to provide greater flexibility for enterprises in how to use the product. Many enterprise customers are seeking to simplify their technology stack and are more willing and interested in taking advantage of a software service for a single use case, division or business unit versus the traditional aspirations to consolidate systems and operate a single platform for a given capability such as CRM, HR, ERP or e-commerce.
“We believe our proven enterprise standing along with the commerce SaaS innovations Moltin has achieved, will allow more enterprise companies still on legacy solutions from large suite vendors to more eagerly migrate to a new independent commerce leader,” Maihorn added.
Going forward, Moltin has been fully integrated into Elastic Path, and the company will go to market with a single product. That expanded product is available now.
“The acquisition was done at the beginning of December and we have been integrating it since then,” Maihorn said.”
