Recap: maxcluster Partner Day 2026

Since 2023, maxcluster Partner Day has been a regular fixture in our event calendar. Once a year, our agency and service partners come together in Paderborn to share their project experiences, talk with our team and give us direct feedback.

The insights from these conversations feed into our day-to-day work. That is why we use Partner Day to show what we are currently working on, but above all to listen: What challenges are our partners facing in their day-to-day agency work? What is working well, and where is there still room for improvement?
   

Things kicked off on the evening of September 16 with our pre-event gathering at the maxcluster restaurant.
For many, this was the first opportunity to reconnect with familiar faces or meet partners in person whom they had previously known mainly through calls and emails.  

Dr. David Werdegärtner provided one of the evening’s highlights with his magic show. Even afterwards, a few tricks left people wondering: How did he actually do that?

The next morning, the event continued at the Home Deluxe Arena.
   

On September 17, we moved to a new venue: for the first time, this year's Partner Day took place in the VIP lounge at SC Paderborn 07's Home Deluxe Arena.

From 8:30 a.m., the rooms began to fill up. Over breakfast, many picked up where they had left off the evening before, and participants gradually spread out across the two floors.

The programme then continued in two parallel tracks. Topics ranged from the product roadmap, Magento and performance to AI in day-to-day agency work, security and data-driven decision-making in e-commerce. Participants could switch between sessions, with plenty of opportunities for a coffee or a chat in between.
 

At 9:15 a.m., our partner managers Markus and Jan officially opened Partner Day.

Their keynote focused on the development of our partner network and what lies ahead in the coming months. run_as_rootand ONEDOTwere recognised as new Platinum Partners. Markus and Jan also introduced the new Partner Challenge 2026/2027 under the motto “Level Up Together”: over twelve months, participating agencies will collect points (XP) in various categories. We will find out who has won in each “league” at Partner Day 2027.

Immediately after the keynote, Nicole took over and presented the top three case studies from our partner network. They were evaluated based on measurable business impact, technical relevance and what other agencies could learn from the projects.

First place went to mr. pixel with FrischeParadies. With a new Shopware 6 architecture, automated SAP integration and stable operations, the checkout abandonment rate fell from 50 to 5 percent.

Second place went to RESPONSE with ladenbau.de. The Shopware 6 store includes more than 100,000 product variants. There have been no outages since launch, and the PageSpeed score has improved by 14 points.

Third place went to integer_net with CHERRY.This project brought together Magento, the Hyvä frontend and hosting, with a focus on performance, user experience and conversion.

Next, our apprentices Niklas and Luca took to the stage. They shared insights into their day-to-day training at maxcluster and showed what they have already worked on: technical fundamentals, work in the data centre, development, service and their first customer conversations. They also presented an AI project of their own, which had inspired a special gift for our partners.
   

After an extended networking break, our Product Owners Julia, Johann and Aleksandra gave an overview of the product roadmap: What has already gone live in 2026, and what are the teams currently working on?

Already live are the backup extension, APM powered by Tideways, the Web Application Firewall, centralized SSH key management and the RAM Auto Booster.

Looking ahead, the Product Owners presented Bot Protection, a central Notification Center, ShopPerformance+ and Event Marker, among other upcoming features. With “MCP Ready”, the product team also showed how Application Center features are to be made accessible to AI agents in the future. Changes will only be executed after explicit confirmation and logged in a traceable manner.
Feedback from our Customer Advisory Board also feeds directly into the roadmap.
   

From 11:40 a.m., the programme ran on both floors simultaneously for the first time. AI featured in both sessions.

Benjamin Eberlei from Tideways combined AI with performance analysis. He showed how AI agents analyse profiling data, pinpoint performance issues and identify concrete ways to optimise performance.

Meanwhile, Felix, showed how AI is already handling specific tasks at maxcluster. He introduced M.I.R.A., the maxcluster Interactive Response Assistant. Since May, it has automatically processed more than 160 scaling tickets, and since August, M.I.R.A. has also been scheduling maintenance windows independently. The AI interprets and structures each request, while fixed code checks whether a change is actually permitted. Special cases are still passed on to a member of staff.

At lunchtime, things quietened down in the presentation rooms. Lunch together offered a chance to continue conversations from the sessions, discuss questions directly with the speakers or chat with partners we hadn't yet had a chance to connect with.

After lunch, instead of heading straight back to the presentation rooms, our guests joined Jürgen Lutter for a stadium tour. Together, they took a look behind the scenes at the Home Deluxe Arena. The tour was particularly popular with our partners and was definitely one of the day's highlights. To round it off, everyone gathered for a group photo in the stands.

Of course, football played a part in the day beyond the stadium tour, too. Our partners could test their accuracy at the target wall and win a small prize for a successful shot 

Throughout the day, the photo booth produced plenty of photos that guests could take home with them straight away.

Our Panini-style stickers sparked at least as much competitive spirit as the target wall. They weren't simply pocketed and taken home. Throughout the day, people collected, searched, compared and swapped. Between sessions, another question naturally came up: Which sticker are you still missing?

We kept the football theme going with our guest book, too. Instead of a Polaroid wall like last year, our partners signed a football this time. More and more names were added throughout the day. The ball now has a permanent place in our entrance area, reminding us of Partner Day 2026.

At 2 p.m., the programme continued on both floors.

For Alexander the focus was on security. He showed how Sansec Shield is designed to provide additional protection for Magento shops during the critical period between a security vulnerability becoming known and a patch being applied. Requests are analysed using Magento-specific rules, and suspicious requests are blocked.

Meanwhile, Felix, showed how feedback from our partners has led to changes in our service: twelve improvements in twelve months. These include automated maintenance windows, round-the-clock scaling, ticket scoring and AI-powered status analysis. If a shop is offline, for example, the ticket is prioritised according to its severity.

In the next session, Andreas von Studnitz from Hyvä explored where Magento stands in 2026 compared with Shopify and Shopware. His view: Hyvä and AI coding assistants are significantly changing development work with Magento—and, with it, the arguments in favour of the platform today. You can find out more about hosting for Hyvä shops on our page about Hyvä hosting.

Meanwhile, the session with Bernhard Leers from Wamoco focused on AI in development. Their AI colleague even has a name: Dobby. Bernhard showed how the coding agent handles tasks, checks results in the browser and creates pull requests. It had already created eleven in a single night. The boundaries are clearly defined: no agent merges code, and no agent deploys it. Those decisions remain in human hands.

Alongside the regular talks, our Key Account Manager Stephan König hosted an open discussion during the same time slot. The discussion centred on working with major clients, particularly what is already working well and where day-to-day challenges remain.
   

Over dessert and coffee in the afternoon, there was another extended break for conversations before the final two sessions began.

Sergej Riewe from ditegra presented a rigorous real-world test: two people, 150 hours and a complete shop relaunch. His team tested how far they could get with AI assistance when turning a traditional, standard shop into a modern mobile-first concept. Sergej was candid about where AI saved time and where the team had to take over.

At the same time, Leon Schubert from Okeano focused on decisions about the shop. His approach: first check whether an observed behaviour is genuinely systematic and commercially relevant. Then make the smallest possible change that can test an assumption. And decide how success will be measured before the test even begins. An example from his own work showed how easily gut instinct can be wrong: in one shop, only around 5 per cent of customers ever saw the homepage.

In the final session, Jason, Head of Sales at maxcluster, examined hosting from a different perspective: how do you actually sell hosting? In his experience, many deals are not lost to competitors but fall through because customers stick with the status quo. So rather than simply comparing technical features and prices, the focus was on total cost of ownership. After all, developer time, downtime, external support and performance issues are also part of a shop's costs. You can find out which factors have the biggest impact in the article TCO Drivers in E-Commerce.

In parallel, Jonas shared ideas and experiments drawn directly from day-to-day service work. Alongside new ShopPerformance checks, the team is exploring automatic image optimisation, Early Hints and AI-assisted index optimisation, among other things. Importantly, the performance roadmap presented is explicitly not a binding release plan. It shows which approaches the team is currently investigating and testing.

The official programme ended at around 5 p.m., bringing our fourth maxcluster Partner Day to a close. To wrap things up, Jan and Markus said goodbye to our guests with a few personal words.

What will stay with us most are the many conversations with our partners. Some began during a session, others over lunch or coffee, or spontaneously between programme items.

Thank you to all the partners and speakers who joined us on 16 and 17 September and helped shape Partner Day. Thank you for your time, your openness and the wonderful atmosphere. A big thank you also goes to our team, as well as to Hyvä and Shopware for their support as sponsors.

We’re already looking forward to seeing you again next year!

And if you’d like to look back at previous Partner Days, you can find our recaps here:

• Recap of maxcluster Partner Day 2025
• Recap of maxcluster Partner Day 2024
• Recap of maxcluster Partner Day 2023