The year 2021 will go down in commercetools history as being among the most productive. After spending much of 2020 focused on scaling the platform for the next decade of growth, 2021 was spent adding new features. We’ve also focused on hiring new talent to increase our development speed, as well as invested in our long-standing and new offices. We’re proud of everything we’ve accomplished with the product in 2021, while never sacrificing uptime, performance and security, and are excited to share our most important updates and future game plan.
We’re #1 platform on the market for GraphQL
In terms of features, we continued to add support for GraphQL, which is now being used by more than 75% of our customers. As a data query language for APIs that allows client developers to retrieve the exact data they want from any source, GraphQL enables brands to build experiences faster. GraphQL improves the way developers work with APIs, develop software and enhance customer experiences.
As the first commerce platform to support GraphQL back in 2016 and co-organizer of last year’s GraphQL Conference, we’ve added dozens of features to ensure that we will remain the number one platform on the market for GraphQL.
Multiple new features to make our customers’ lives easier
We’ve now begun the most substantial portion of our all-new concept for stores and brands. This allows for orders, customer accounts, products, prices and more to be scoped to a store, brand, line of business or any other segmentation. This feature is not limited to specific use cases and – like everything we do at commercetools – is completely flexible.
Due to customer demand, we also released a brand-new audit log feature that allows organizations to track all changes made to objects such as orders and products. This was the first major release by our first US-based development team. We’ve also built an entirely new team in the US focused on discounts, as American-style discounts are unique and require in-depth knowledge of US retailing. Finally, we’ve added hundreds of smaller features that will simplify work processes for our customers.
Accelerating our development speed with more talent
From an organizational standpoint, more than 40 new colleagues joined us over the course of the year. We’ve also almost doubled the size of our development department with three all-new development teams based out of our US headquarters in Durham, North Carolina office, ensuring our development rate has accelerated beyond what was already a market-leading pace. These changes to our team will allow us to speed up our development and complement our company’s portfolio strategy as we look forward to 2022.
Stepping on the gas: Product roadmap for the upcoming year
In 2022, we plan to further extend investments in our existing commerce platform. For PIM, we want to focus on improving workflows with usability improvements and see how to assist in time-consuming work. We will continue to explore how we can support our customers with different business models and to innovate or pivot without massive investments into IT. We will also keep improving and innovating in user and developer experiences, and generally plan to grow in every possible way with new cloud locations, handling even more traffic and growing our teams.
In terms of security, we’re working through all the various audits required by our customers, including ISO 27001. Finally, we’re planning on expanding the cloud locations we serve from. Today, we serve from US Central (AWS and GCP), Europe (AWS and GCP) and Australia (GCP). We will soon offer our platform in China and one or two other locations that will be decreed by business needs.
Discover more of our biggest achievements, as well as our plans for 2022, in our Best of commercetools 2021 booklet.