To summarize the last twelve months: wow!

Since the acquisition of Cactus Commerce by Ascentium, a big part of my day job was working on integrating the two businesses into a new brand and value proposition. This finally came to fruition with the launch of the SMITH brand a few weeks back, along with the retirement of Cactus Commerce and Ascentium brands. Check out www.smith.co to see the results!

But, the real focus has been capitalizing on the opportunity with the transition of the Commerce Server business. The last year has seen us extracting the product from Redmond; re-branding it; doing lots of 1×1 engagement with customers, partners, & analysts; and now debuting what’s next…

Last Friday brings the Release Preview of Commerce Server 10, which addresses being CMS-agnostic and the challenge of proper separation of business and presentation logic to allow HTML/CSS/JavaScript designers to make look-and-feel changes. Likewise, our new brand – commerceserver.net – debuted, which sees the right management structure and branding to effectively curate the global partner ecosystem for the product.

The initial reactions have been very positive – nothing like Peter Sheldon’s excellent post from Forrester Research to sum it all up: http://blogs.forrester.com/peter_sheldon/12-11-30-commerce_server_cactus_commerce_ascentium_the_path_forward_0

These changes have been a long time coming. We had to get it right. And with them finally seeing the light of day, I can finally come out of pseudo-stealth mode. 🙂