Orium and Gluo Launch Composable Commerce Center of Excellence
Initiative based in Mexico City will strengthen foothold of composable commerce in Latin America and beyond.
Two of the most established composable commerce firms in the Americas have teamed up to launch a Composable Commerce Center of Excellence (COE) in Mexico City.
Toronto-based Orium has invested in the venture along with Gluo, which is headquartered in Mexico City.
Orium is the leading composable commerce consultancy and systems integrator for omnichannel retail in North America. Gluo specializes in developing digital products and experiences for the composable commerce market, including e-commerce websites, mobile apps, UI/UX design, and CMS.
Orium Founder and CEO Jason Cottrell believes the new Center of Excellence will strengthen both the composable commerce ecosystem and the partnership between the two companies.
“We think of ourselves as sister firms serving the Americas. Our goal with the Center of Excellence is to build and expand a strong team of 100-plus people, to serve leading composable commerce vendors like commercetools and BigCommerce in the LatAm region,” Cottrell said.
The COE gives Orium a bigger presence in Latin America and more inroads to the area’s rich pool of talent. Gluo will gain access to Orium’s React.js accelerators for composable commerce, plus Orium’s resource catalog for skills training and onboarding.
Gluo Founder and CEO Jaime De la Fuente said the partnership will extend his company’s reach in the North American marketplace and enhance his team’s knowledge base.
“Orium has expertise in composable commerce in North America, which is a leading market in terms of technology and state-of-the-art digital commerce. Latin America may be a few years behind in that sense. So Gluo can leverage Orium’s expertise to accelerate our offerings in Latin America and bring that expertise to our projects in the region,” De la Fuente said.
Shared values
Although 4,000 kilometers separate Toronto and Mexico City on a map, Orium and Gluo are already on the same page in many ways. Both have existing relationships with composable commerce solution providers such as Algolia, commercetools, Contentful, BigCommerce, Elastic Path, Netlify, and Vercel. But Cottrell said the synergies between Orium and Gluo run even deeper than that.
“What stood out to me was that Jaime and the rest of the team at Gluo really shared our vision that composable commerce is the next wave of commerce, the next horizon. There’s also a lot of similarities between our team cultures and the way that we approach work. We’re already working on joint customer engagements together, and that’s what ultimately encouraged us to move forward on this,” Cottrell said.
De la Fuente also riffed on the importance of culture at Gluo, which is celebrating its twentieth anniversary this year.
“Twenty years ago, technology was so different and we’ve been riding different waves of technologies. To ride all those waves during all these years – working through lots of challenges, getting good feedback from our customers, and growing together – that’s what I’m most proud of. It’s our team and their capability to deliver,” he said.
According to a 2022 research report, Mexico’s e-commerce market:
- was worth $48.6 billion in 2021
- is the second largest in Latin America behind Brazil’s
- is expected to grow by 24% between 2021 and 2025
The report also notes that online retail now accounts for 15 per cent of the total retail market in Latin America, more than double the six percent it stood at before the pandemic.
Christine Wong
Senior Technology Staff Writer, Orium
I've been telling enterprise technology stories for almost three decades in print, online, and on television. I started out in journalism, covering the telecom boom, the birth of social media and the emergence of digital commerce. I'm always looking for the human angle in every technology story I write.