Varien released its Enterprise Edition a month ago and here are some thoughts about the release.

With over 750k downloads of the community-version and 85k community members Varien knew that many of their users would be interested in a paid Enterprise-version, and after a few months of hard work and countless feedback from the community and their partners Varien released the first Enterprise-version April 15th.

Pricing

Pricing of the Enterprise-version starts at $8.900, which in our opinion is way overpriced. The most expensive enterprise-version of MySQL, not to compare that one with an ecommerce-solution too much, cost €3999, around 50% lower than Magento’s Enterprise-version. Both the prices for Magento Enterprise and MySQL Enterprise Premium are annual fees.

A good ecommerce system will cost a few bucks. No doubt. But by setting the price so high, only the biggest companies are given the opportunity to get all the Enterprise-features. And speaking of Enterprise-features, lets take a look at what you exactly get when you pay almost $9000 a year for Magento compared to nothing.

Features

Here’s what you get in the Enterprise-version compared to the free Community-version. We put a score to the right of each feature, with the importance of the feature in our opinion. 10 is best.

- PCI Data Security support (coming soon), 8/10
- Varien’s “World Class” support on all the Core modules, including SLA, 10/10
- Warranty to a certain level, 8/10
- More advanced Roles and Permission Restrictions (per Website and Storeview), 6/10
- Logging of Administrator actions (This cant be worth mention, really?), 2/10
- Gift Certificates (both Physical and Virtual), 8/10
- Customer Store Credits, 8/10
- Content Staging and Merging, 9/10
- Category View- and Purchase-permissions based on customer group, 6/10
- Private (Club) sales including Events, Invitations, etc., 6/10
- Strong Data Encryption (no details), 5/10

Here we lack a lot of features in this list. Lets mention a few:

- Magento Monitor – webbased monitoring of the store, bottlenecks, performance advisor, etc

- Better performance – memcached support, etc.

- Extended backend controlpanel with more reports, better import/export features, etc. Most Enterprise-companies require much more to the backend/reporting than whats offered today

- Enterprise-modules – give their partners the oppurtunity to develop and release Enterprise-verified modules for MagentoConnect

Conclusion

We know there will be released alot of new features to the Enterprise-version by the time, but my opinion is that Varien released the Enterprise-version much earlier than they should. The number of Enterprise-sales would be much higher if the potential enterprise-customers got a better “Wow-factor” than we feel they’re sitting with now.

Read more about Varien’s Enterprise-version here:

http://www.magentocommerce.com/product/enterprise-edition