Why Michael Jordan’s Failures Are the Secret to Our Intershop Success?

Table of content

What does this have to do with Incentro? Everything.

Michael Jordan missed more than 9,000 shots before becoming a legend. In the world of enterprise software, the path is not so different. At Incentro, our journey with Intershop began over a decade ago with challenges, immature markets, and the occasional 'missed shot.' Today, that perseverance has turned us into one of the most experienced teams in the world and earned us a 'Partner of the Year' nomination. This is the story of how specialization made us unstoppable

I've missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I've lost almost 300 games. Twenty-six times, I've been trusted to take the game-winning shot and missed. I've failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.

Michael Jordan - Global Icon

What does this have to do with Incentro? Everything.

Incentro opened its doors in Spain in 2010 with the vision of working with cutting-edge technologies from the Netherlands, technologies that were far ahead of the Spanish market and typically took years to reach the country’s leading companies.

A prime example is Intershop: Intershop is an enterprise-level e-commerce platform designed to model complex sales processes, especially in the B2B sector. It stands out for its robust architecture, which allows for managing multiple stores, catalogs, and international channels from a single centralized solution.

More than 12 years ago, we began working with this technology in our Santander office, growing and developing it further every day. Obviously, it wasn't all success from the start. We were a young company with a Dutch philosophy in a very new and immature market. That path of trial and error is exactly what led us to where we are today: we now have a team of over 16 specialists with years of experience. We are likely the largest and most experienced team worldwide, and this year, we have been nominated as “Partner of the Year” by Intershop.

Our portfolio includes clients such as Unceta, Loterías de Reino Unido y Países Bajos, the RAI Amsterdam o Wolters Kluwer whom we are currently migrating to the Intershop Cloud. To this day, companies from all over the world still reach out to us to replicate these successes.

Furthermore, over the years, we have grown and adapted alongside them. A great example was when they acquired the German AI company Sparque to power their search engine, and we successfully implemented it for our client, Wolters Kluwer.

What made this possible? Looking back, what truly makes the difference is the people. The same individuals who started with this technology years ago are still here today, getting better every day. As Bruce Lee once said: “I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.” If we extrapolate that to IT: most companies have 10,000 technologies and 10,000 people coming and going. But if you find the right people and they specialize, you become unstoppable.