017.07.2015
Elastic Path Software Inc., an ecommerce company helping the world’s biggest brands generate more revenue, today released the latest version of its Commerce Platform to make it easier and more affordable for companies to deploy experience-driven commerce and support the entire customer lifecycle. The foundation of the platform is the company’s REST Level 3 hypermedia API (application programming interface) technology, Cortex, which was recently granted the first of several filed patents.
Many Commerce Platforms Can’t Keep Up With Customer Expectations
“Consumers want brands to remember the choices they made, the promotions they submitted online, and soon, purchases through social networks like Pinterest so they can continue shopping whenever and wherever they may be,” said Peter Lukomskyj, Vice President Products of Elastic Path. “Sounds simple, but this stretches the capabilities of most commerce platforms out there and their development teams who need to support hundreds of sites and applications supporting customer transactions. Even changing a simple checkout functionality can take months and cause a lot of trouble.”
Not All APIs are Created Equal
What sets the Elastic Path Commerce platform apart from other solutions is its REST Level 3 hypermedia API. An API is a way for developers to communicate with certain applications, much like a middleman. An API accepts requests and, if that request is allowed, returns the data.
An analogy to how most “common” APIs work is comparable to a hardcopy magazine. Users have to thumb through the ads, pictures and other content before they can find the table of contents or get to the articles that are of most interest. The content is not searchable nor is it interconnected throughout the magazine.
The Elastic Path REST Level 3 hypermedia API is like a digital magazine that is searchable and browsable. With a click, users can bypass ads and irrelevant content to go where they want to go in the magazine. Keywords, articles and images are connected to other relevant content that may be useful to the reader. For a developer team this means a shared, common way they can communicate with the API, as well as intuitively and intelligently guiding them with everything they can request, exactly how to ask for it and how to receive it.
Key Features and Benefits
The latest Elastic Path release focuses on delivering outstanding new commerce features in three areas:
- A 1,200% performance improvement to overall throughput
- Up to 95% reduction in operations cost when deployed on Amazon Web Services (AWS)
- Full support for the new Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) 6.1, bringing to market the first and most comprehensive AEM 6.1 compatible commerce + content platform in the world
The Elastic Path Commerce platform provides four core technical benefits that reduce the time and effort needed to create integrated omnichannel experiences:
- Intelligent – Presents the right information with the corresponding behavior, at the right time
- Secure – Provides a single, hardened point of entry. Eliminates the need to expose the details of underlying systems to outside developers and digital agencies
- Fast – Can quickly add new touchpoints or platforms without making changes to the API or having to create multiple versions
- Scalable and Future Proof – Maintain older touchpoints for decades while adding new platforms as they become relevant to company commerce activities
“Elastic Path is the only enterprise commerce provider with a hypermedia API, developed from the ground up over the past three years after we searched the marketplace unsuccessfully for an ideal framework and engine,” added Lukomskyj. “Our Cortex technology is built to help companies take advantage of the expanding ecosystem of commerce without being buried in multiple API versions that make maintenance and future-proofing for a new customer touchpoint, a nightmare.
elasticpath.com
