Magento’s first London Partner Summit was held yesterday. Representatives from many of the leading Magento solution partners came together with staff from Magento, including Michel Goossens, Bob Schwartz and Scott Dahlgren. There was a lively discussion around support, the eBay acquisition of Magento and the product roadmap, which continued into the evening.

It’s clear Magento are very excited about the eBay acquisition and that eBay see Magento as being a core part of their eCommerce strategy going forward. I spotted the word ‘platform’ about 20 times in the discussion, a reference to eBay’s x.commerce strategy. It seems that a team will be weaving together a set of products (including the eBay engine itself, Magento Go, Magento Enterprise and GSI’s eCommerce applications) and the extensions and third party services that sit on top of them, and making it much easier for us to use different elements together. This suggests a set of standards and APIs, with a store that allows open source and commercial add-ons to be acquired and installed easily. To make this work across all those products is not going to be easy: we already see issues of inter-operability and variable quality in the Magento Connect world, so extending that concept to eBay, GSI and something new looks like a great technical challenge.

Ultimately, if it all comes together, retailers, solution partners like Pod1, and other software developers will be able to use and extend the offering in an enormous range of different ways, which sounds pretty exciting.

There was some discussion about how the eBay and Magento Go news positions Magento in the enterprise eCommerce market-place. Magento is un-seating incumbent ATG, Websphere, Hybris and Demandware solutions around the world, we were told, and there’s certainly something in the idea that Magento Go and eBay offer massively scaleable and fast eCommerce platforms: something essential to a large-scale retailer. We were told Magento Go has taught the team a huge amount about scale and performance, that will position the enterprise offering much more strongly.

The Magento roadmap looks exciting: Enterprise 1.10 already shows great performance benefits over its predecessors, and 1.11 and 1.12 are in the pipeline. Enterprise 2 is scheduled for next year, and will be a radical re-engineering of the Magento platform: perhaps it’ll be called x.commerce?

Finally, on support, Magento has been hiring and is rolling out commercial and technical support for partners and clients in Europe, a new improved support portal is on the way, and all in all they’re maturing the support offering in a very positive way. I think we’ve already experienced some of the benefits of that at Pod1. Training is a big focus for them, and they’ve already trained more than 200 developers in their newly launched training program.