Hello (PIM) World!

If Akeneo is a new player in the product content management area, our story actually started a few years ago. Our team is working in the e-commerce area for more than 10 years, helping merchants to adapt themselves to a perpetually renewing environment. We have always been fascinated by the swiftness and the agility of web technologies. E-commerce systems are more and more sophisticated and – thanks to open source – easily available for any kind of business – regardless its size.

But as we were talking to merchants, we discovered a quite surprising fact. Even though most merchants were happy with their e-commerce applications, they were (and still are) sharing same concerns about the way they manage product information.

Project after project we learned how difficult it could be for a company to create, enrich and maintain consistent product data through a constantly growing number of channels. And no vendor on the market seemed to address these needs of an user friendly tool paired with strong technical capabilities.

That’s why we decided to create Akeneo : an open source PIM solution created with merchants for merchants. From the very beginning of this project, we kept in mind three strong convictions we had about the DNA of our tool :

• Akeneo is designed to be used by non technical users. Even if a PIM hides a lot a technical complexity, at the end of the day, marketers are using it. Everyday.
• Akeneo is super connected. A PIM without connections with other third party systems is useless. PIM should be an articulation point in an IT system.
• Akeneo is open source. Black boxes are not for us. We believe that openness and collaboration are the only valid way to create software today. And the only way to deliver and maintain a platform capable of growing at the same pace as the merchants needs.

We are now getting very close to share our work with the community. Laying the foundations of a new approach for product information management. We will use this blog to present some of the key features of Akeneo in coming days. And we would be honored to get your feedback and comments on what we are proposing today : a simple answer to complex needs!