CAMPBELL, CA--(Marketwired - Apr 12, 2016) - Today, Magento Commerce, the leading provider of open omnichannel innovation, announced the general availability of Magento Enterprise Cloud Edition, a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) environment for its flagship Magento 2.0 digital commerce platform. Magento Enterprise Cloud Edition runs on Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud and is built to power innovative e-commerce experiences with the rapid deployment of fully customizable, secure and scalable Web storefronts, combined with a leading hosting and managed services infrastructure.

A New Era of Commerce in the Cloud
In traditional Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) commerce solutions, merchants' ability to rapidly innovate and iterate can be limited by the often rigid and closed nature of some multitenant eCommerce solutions. By comparison, Magento Enterprise Cloud Edition provides merchants the ability to offer highly differentiated customer experiences, simplified integration with existing systems and enhanced merchant ability to respond to the rapid pace of technology change. These capabilities greatly reduce the deployment and management costs for merchants compared to multitenant SaaS commerce solutions whose one-size-fits-some approach often forces retailers to tailor their business to their technology rather than tailoring their technology to what works best for them and for their customers.

"Magento Enterprise Cloud Edition defines the post-SaaS commerce platform era. It's a first-of-its-kind in-market solution and a major differentiator in the broader Magento product portfolio," said Mark Lavelle, CEO of Magento Commerce. "With this new platform running on AWS, we ensure that our merchants have the agility to respond to a rapidly changing environment, can continuously deploy innovations, easily scale to meet unexpected demand and don't have to worry about the day-to-day management of infrastructure."

As agility and deployment become strategic priorities for enterprises, market momentum behind PaaS will continue to accelerate. According to Gartner¹, "By 2018, model-driven, high-productivity PaaS will be the dominant technology platform for transforming into an adaptive and responsive digital business." While there are many reasons for this shift, PaaS adoption is driven by merchants increasing need for greater productivity, control and differentiation. Also according to Gartner², "Unlike SaaS, PaaS allows organizations to create cloud-based, cloud-native business applications that are unique."

Architected for Innovation
Magento Enterprise Cloud Edition offers all the benefits of modern cloud computing that are most commonly associated with SaaS solutions: Elastic scalability, high resilience and availability, PCI compliance, global availability and automated patching. Additionally, Magento Enterprise Cloud Edition preserves what has made Magento the platform of choice for thousands of leading retailers, brands and manufacturers -- the flexibility of Magento's extensible architecture, enhanced by a global ecosystem of innovative partners and developers.

"Magento Enterprise Cloud is a game-changer," said Steve Yankovich, Chief Product Officer of Magento Commerce. "We combined a highly performant and scalable PaaS platform with everything our clients love about Magento -- the ability to try, test and deploy new customizations to their stores in a continuous manner with no dependencies on our product roadmap or release schedule."

At the core of Magento Enterprise Cloud Edition lies an innovative PaaS that enables merchants and their system integration partners to adopt continuous delivery practices by providing best-in-class DevOps, release management and cloud management tools that make deploying, testing, promoting and operating multiple environments rapid, easy and manageable.

Backed by Leading Technology, Improving Commerce One Business at a Time
To deliver these benefits, Magento Enterprise Cloud Edition runs on Amazon Web Services (AWS), tapping into the reliability, scalability and low cost that are AWS hallmarks. More and more mid-market and enterprise companies are adopting AWS to tap into the power of the cloud. In fact, as 30 percent of Magento Enterprise clients already host on AWS, Magento Enterprise Cloud Edition facilitates what is already a natural pairing for many Magento customers.

"We are pleased to see that Magento has built its new commerce platform on top of AWS as we firmly believe that AWS offers merchants a flexible, secured, scalable and low-cost environment for online sales and retailing," said Hal Bennett, General Manager Global Technology Partners, Amazon Web Services, Inc. "We look forward to supporting Magento and their customers on their journey to the cloud."

Magento has partnered with best-of-breed solutions Platform.sh, New Relic, Fastly and Blackfire.io in developing its cloud offering. Architected and optimized for Magento 2.0.5, Magento Enterprise Cloud Edition is available now. For more information, please visit www.magento.com.

About Magento Commerce

Trusted by more than 250,000 businesses worldwide, Magento Commerce is the leading provider of open omnichannel innovation to retailers, brands and branded manufacturers across retail B2C and B2B industries. In addition to its flagship open source digital commerce platform, Magento Commerce boasts a strong portfolio of cloud-based omnichannel solutions empowering merchants to successfully integrate digital and physical shopping experiences. With over $50B in gross merchandise volume transacted on the platform annually, Magento Commerce is the foremost provider to the Internet Retailer Top 1000 and the Internet Retailer B2B 300, counting more than double the clients to the next closest competitor. Magento Commerce is supported by a vast global network of solution and technology partners, a highly active global developer community and the largest eCommerce marketplace for extensions available for download on the Magento Marketplace. More information can be found at www.magento.com.

¹Gartner, Predicts 2016: Business Transformation and Process Management Bridge the Strategy-to-Execution Gap, 30 November 2015

²Gartner, The Key Trends in PaaS, 2015, Yefim V. Natis, 22 April 2015