Elastic Path Software, a pioneer of flexible ecommerce software, has announced a record close to the fiscal year, marked by strong revenue growth, new customer acquisition and technology innovation. Additionally, the company has expanded its executive team and appointed IT industry luminary Gordon Janzen as chief operating officer to oversee company operations to meet growing customer demand.

Key highlights of Elastic Path’s fiscal year financial and operational activities include:

Increased license revenue by 60 percent over last fiscal year, while maintaining a 5-year TCO that is less than half that of any "on-demand" or other licensed software vendors
Added more than 70 new customers including Breville USA, Coastal Contacts, Bond and Bond and I Want One of Those!, bringing the Company’s impressive total number of ecommerce platform deployments to more than 125 worldwide
Aggressively expanded international operations to meet the global demands of its customers in the Europe, and Asia Pacific.
Experienced 16th consecutive quarter of positive cash flow
Met increased demand for solutions by partnering with established system integrators including Excentric Thinking and Avenue A Razorfish

“Historically, many retailers have not capitalized on the power of ecommerce -- failing to attract and convert customers profitably. With online sales slated to reach more than 95 billion dollars by the end of this year, retailers are beginning to move toward more effective ecommerce strategies,” says Harry Chemko, co-founder and chief executive officer of Elastic Path. “Elastic Path's success this year can be attributed to retailers' recognition of the importance of implementing a solution that provides an optimal shopping experience for consumers while delivering an ecommerce platform that has the power to attract customers and drive sales.”

Elastic Path has appointed Gordon Janzen as chief operating officer (COO). In his new role, Janzen will oversee and streamline operational processes including product development, support and marketing. He is an experienced IT leader with more than 16 years of expertise in strategy and business planning. He has held senior management positions at IBM Global Services and co-founded Apparent Networks.

With its release of Elastic Path 5 this fall, the company has remained true to its pioneering roots. The re-engineered platform delivers a powerful promotion rules engine, innovative search engine marketing functionality, faceted in-site search and navigation, and full web services capabilities to mid-sized online retailers. The platform’s flexibility and significantly lower price point, as compared to competitors, is enabled by its use of open source components. Elastic Path also released its AJAX-powered Elastic Path One Page technology, which creates an optimal checkout experience and enables returning customers to complete an order with a single click. Elastic Path is the first major ecommerce software vendor to offer a 100 percent browser-based Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX)-powered one page checkout.

Nancy Morison, vice president of product management at Coastal Contacts Inc., indicates that competing ecommerce platforms from ATG and Blue Martini did not provide the flexibility and scalability they desired for their growing business. As an added benefit, Elastic Path’s one page checkout was inline with their company’s customer-centric culture. Elastic Path 5 allows Coastal Contacts to use guided selling techniques that truly tap into what visitors to the site need, preventing shopping cart abandonment and encouraging customer loyalty.

Recent findings from Aberdeen research group further support the functionality that Elastic Path’s technology provides, indicating that critical success factors for multi-channel merchants including “efficient internal processes, allowing for retailers to operate on a product by product basis, versus channel by channel.” Aberdeen also reveals that the number one pressure associated with multi-channel retailing is “customer expectation of seamless purchase and delivery options,” a core function of Elastic Path’s One Page product.