Akeneo introduces a simpler product release cycle

Following the cloud launch, we announced a change in our product release cycle. Our objective was to provide a more nimble and responsive approach to market demands and to more rapidly deliver new product enhancements on a predictable schedule.

For the most part, we have delivered on this promise! Quarterly releases consisting of two short-term support (STS) versions and two long-term support (LTS) per year have arrived either on schedule or shortly after the planned release date. After two years, we have received feedback from many customers that it can be difficult to keep up with this release cadence, especially if they are on-premises or Flexibility Mode (PaaS) customers. Planning upgrades and executing them can be time-consuming and require coordination across several teams. This issue was particularly acute for x.3 and x.0 releases which occurred 90 days apart and were both LTS versions. Serenity Mode (SaaS) customers received new features automatically every 90 days -- but even then, certain incremental improvements and enhancements could have been available even sooner. Another challenge from our frequent release cycle is ensuring that the connectors and extensions developed and maintained by our technology partners are compatible with the latest releases. Our ecosystem is a very strong source of business value for Akeneo customers and we want to encourage it to grow and easily keep pace with our product releases. Based on this customer and partner feedback, we have decided to further simplify our release cycle in order to better support everyone whether you're an on-premises customer, a Flexibility Mode customer, a Serenity Mode customer, or a technology partner who develops extensions and connectors for the PIM.

What’s the new release schedule?

For on-premises and Flexibility Mode customers, our new release cycle will make it even easier to plan for upgrades and will reduce the number of upgrades necessary to keep pace with the latest feature and performance improvements. Instead of two STS versions followed by two LTS versions each 90 days apart, we'll release one major version every year for our on-premises and Flexibility Mode customers. These releases will be Long Term Support versions, which will remain at 18 months. Consequently, we will no longer do STS releases! This will reduce technical support complexity and confusion about how long your version is supported, as well as simplify project and upgrade planning for you and your solution partner or integrator. For Serenity Mode customers, our new release schedule will enable us to deploy new features and improvements on a monthly basis instead of quarterly. You’ll receive more business value more frequently, with Akeneo taking care of upgrades on your behalf as we do today. For planning purposes, our current release schedule and status of support will be as follows:

• To support this transition, Akeneo PIM version 3.2 (shipped in July 2019) was announced as an STS version, but we will now consider it an LTS version and will support it through January 2021.
• We will not release a “3.3” LTS release in October as previously planned.
• The next major LTS release (version “4.0”) will occur in early 2020 approximately at the time of our annual Akeneo PIM Summit, and every 12 months thereafter. As always, should there be the need for patches in between annual releases, we’ll provide them as required.
• SaaS releases will occur at the end of each week and your SaaS instance will be automatically upgraded by our team.

Here’s what the release schedule looks like in full color mode! We believe this new release cycle will enable Akeneo to better serve our customers on all deployments while reducing disruption and simplifying version management and technical support for all. And we’re really excited about the new enhancements we are currently developing for 2020. We can’t wait to see you at Akeneo PIM Summit 2020 to tell you all about it!