Why upgrade to Magento 1.9?

I was talking this week with a few prospects about why to upgrade to Enterprise 1.9 and I thought it would be worthwhile to cut through some of the marketing speak and give a few simple reasons.

1. It's faster: Magento has made significant performance enhancements in this release and since that is the single greatest complaint we hear about Magento, it's definitely worth doing. We have found that many companies have not taken advantage of all of the performance enhancements that they can do but in any case, 1.9 has features that will really increase page load times (with full page caching) and has other improvements that are under the covers but equally as important.

2. Search: A tighter integration with Solr and the ability to do search based navigation is really useful.

3. Marketing and Conversion: Better one to one marketing and communication, ability to have different prices for different groups and better utilization of private sales are all good reasons to upgrade.

4. PCI compliance: At some point all of our customers need to cross this bridge and the newest version with Payment Bridge gives you a path to achieve PCI compliance at not too high a cost. Basically for the cost of another server and some setup, you are PCI compliant through their Payment Bridge.

While it is impossible to give a price for conversion, if our customers haven't done anything crazy with the Magento core code, it generally takes between 20 and 60 hours to do the upgrade including testing and cutover. For those with lots of core customizations, we provide estimates but in most cases, it is definitely worth it to upgrade.