The Imagine 2016 Conference Welcomes Magic, Magento 2, & Magento Enterprise Cloud

Endertech’s leadership team attended Imagine 2016 this week, the annual Magento Conference held in Las Vegas. It was at the Wynn for the 2nd time in a row, and was a gala affair hosting thousands of Magento professionals, retailers, and vendors.

Earvin “Magic” Johnson was the keynote speaker, and yours truly had a chance to meet him! Magic gave an inspirational speech and spent time walking about the throngs of admirers as he did it. Way to go executives for landing such a star to share time in our presence! We all felt special. 🙂

Besides the delicious dinners and evening entertainment, the days were full of new learning, nurturing relationships, and significant announcements.

Significant Announcements at Magento Conference

In the category of significant announcements, they announced the coming of the Magento Enterprise Cloud, an AWS integrated environment designed for users of Magento Enterprise who want to have their cloud environment expertly managed by the organization itself.

The platform boasts a host of impressive features such as auto-scaling and easy to spin up test environments.

New Learning

As for new learning, Endertech in particular is quite excited to finally feel confident deploying the Magento 2 platform for clients. It came out of beta a few months ago, and this conference was the first opportunity to have deep dive sessions with the developers since the official launch.

Magento 2 has many improved features… the admin UI is probably the most noticeable to us, as it has been streamlined, simplified, and made mobile-friendly, all while retaining the power we love from version 1.x. As a geek, I love the new command-line tools and composer-based set up procedures.

Those who have Magento 1.x sites will be fond of the noticeable performance improvements in version 2. Finally full page cache is a first class citizen available to all. If you have a Magento 1.x site and are seeking better performance, consider upgrading now… though it might only be practical for you if your site is stock, or close to stock, as the extension library is still developing, and the methods for transferring customizations are somewhat manual.

Nurturing Relationships

Nurturing relationships and making new ones was another theme for us at Endertech… we enjoyed our time chatting with folks from Alpine Consulting, Oro Platform, LiteSpeed, Klevu, dotMailer, and Magento developers themselves amongst other individuals and organizations.

Moving on from here, we are excited to begin leveraging this experience! Look out in the near future for new Magento 2 e-commerce website launches from Endertech, and our next e-commerce newsletter will include tips we’ve learned for those of you looking to expand what this awesome e-commerce platform can do for you.