We spoke to Sonassi‘s MD, Neil Christie, to find out more about their hosting services, why they are coming along to this year’s event, and what we should all be looking out for in the eCommerce industry in 2019 and beyond.
1. Can you tell us about your company, your services, or your products?
Sonassi offers a Magento hosting platform, MageStack, built on a micro-service architecture. Supported by Magento developers, we are all about quality first.
With a huge focus on security, performance, and support, Sonassi’s MageStack represents a best-of-breed solution for Magento.
2. What is your company ethos?
Quality first. We pride ourselves on doing things the right way.
3. Tell us what makes your company different from others in the industry?
Where we differ is in our roots, we started as a Magento development company, offering consultative support for performance and scaling for the most demanding Magento stores.
Our approach was to build a hosting platform for Magento, by having a deep comprehension of exactly what it takes to make Magento fly.
4. How do you feel that your company fits into the wider Magento community?
We are passionate about doing things the right way. Sonassi staff are regularly active on forums, sponsored events, sharing knowledge with the community and contributing fixes to the Magento core itself.
5. What do you think are the benefits of sponsoring an event like Meet Magento UK?
Our motivation for being Gold Sponsor is so we can hold as many conversations as possible. Our team are genuinely interested in solving problems for e-tailers from a technical standpoint, but also have relationships with traditional high street brands in retail and we want to be involved in our customers’ online strategies.
6. How did you get involved with sponsoring MM19UK?
The Magento community is tightly integrated and connected. We sponsored last year and reached out early to support MM19UK.
7. As well as sponsoring Meet Magento UK 2018, have you sponsored any other Magento events before, if so, which ones?
Over the past year, we have sponsored Meet Magento UK, Meet Magento NYC and MageTitans UK.
8. What was your highlight from MM18UK?
Meeting people and putting faces to Twitter handles. The beauty of the Magento community is in the sheer number of talented people involved. Getting to meet them in real life is always a rewarding experience, followed by the excellent food put on by the organisers.
9. Why do you think it’s important to take time out to come to events like ours?
It’s a chance to listen to dozens, if not hundreds of user experiences with Magento that help us drive our product development pipeline. It’s rare that we get that chance to talk to so many people in such a short space of time.
10. What do you think makes the Magento community so unique?
The knowledge, the willingness to share and of course, the people and personalities that make up the community.
11. What do you think has been the biggest leap forward in the eCommerce industry so far?
The biggest leap was eCommerce itself. It’s become patently clear that retailers without an eCommerce approach are now suffering. Once a store presence is established, it’s been iterative improvements around intelligent marketing tools, linking the store to internal systems, and finding out what works and what doesn’t. I think we’re yet to see another step-change, and we have some thoughts on what that could look like…
12. What trends, tactics, or tools should we be focusing on in 2019? What do you predict we’ll see this year?
Progressive Web Apps are becoming more mainstream, making the shopping experience more seamless… but we feel the experience of retail and etail are going to come together in future years and that we will see aggregators of multiple stores that start to provide much more immersive concierge services both online and offline for consumers.
13. Why should merchants attend Meet Magento UK 2019?
There are too few valuable networking opportunities within the Magento and eCommerce space to ignore the MM19UK event. It’s a fantastic learning opportunity.
14. What are you most looking forward to on the day?
The conversations around current challenges and future opportunities in the eCommerce space.
15. What awesome goodies are you planning to bring with you to The Mermaid this June?
Come and visit us to find out!
16. Have you got any exciting news, updates, or plans for this year that the Meet Magento UK audience might be interested in hearing?
The lightning fast eCommerce hosting and expert support you’ve come to expect from Sonassi, is now backed by iomart – a multimillion pound company with over 20 years’ experience. This investment is key in letting us accelerate our plans and get even better than before.
17. Why should attendees visit you in the Sponsor Marketplace on June 19th?
Honestly. The main reason to speak to us is that we’ve got heritage with Magento – we’re a brand synonymous with Magento and have been for over a decade – but all this time, we’ve operated in the shadows, rarely having a presence at events where people can come talk to us and greet us.
Want to know more about Sonassi? Head to their website now
Sonassi would like to offer you a special discount on MM19UK tickets. Use their code SONASSIROCKS at the checkout, to get money off your General and Group tickets.