End of the road for Adobe Business Catalyst
Adobe Business Catalyst will be decommissioned on March 26, 2021. If you have a Business Catalyst website, or are a Business Catalyst partner looking for a solution, talk to Kook about how we can help you migrate to a new solution.
Digital giant Adobe has announced the "end of life" of its popular Business Catalyst hosted website solution.
The decision to "focus on other products" is a double whammy for website owners, because the Business Catalyst business model is built around the Adobe Partner Program. "Partners" were the salesmen, selling the BC end product to businesses.
The partners made revenue off reselling BC, taking a slice of the monthly fee paid for each website via a rebate from Adobe.
The collapse of BC highlights the risk business owners face by using websites that are hosted solutions, also known as SaaS (Software as a Service).
The "engine" - the source code that runs the sites - never belongs to the website "owner". You are renting all the tools for a monthly fee and the content is all yours, but without the engine you have no way of displaying the data.
One of the ironies of this saga will be that the Partner agencies that predominantly use Business Catalyst are smaller ones, where they do not have the technical expertise to use any other platform, or migrate customers to a new one.
It's actually one of the main issues we see here at Kook. The easier a "DIY" platform is to configure by a non-tech person, the less likely that agency has anyone remotely able to diagnose and remedy a problem.
So, it won't be a big surprise that your agency may not be the best person to advise what to do from here.
If you get that feeling, give us a call here at Kook - we have 17 years of experience in web development, all our programmers are in-house and have experience in data migration and integration.
After all, you want to ensure it's not a case of out of the frypan and into the fire.
UPDATED: Business catalyst end of life extended to 26 September, 2021
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