From end-of-life Magento to enterprise procurement-ready — with zero middleware.
MedSupply Partners, a medical supply distributor serving hospitals, labs, and research institutions, migrated 19,508 products off end-of-life Magento to BigCommerce Enterprise and replaced punchout middleware with a native cXML 1.2.040 server built and operated by Fowara. Institutional buyers now punch out from Prendio directly into MedSupply's storefront with contract pricing — no middleware contract, no six-week onboarding queues.
Getting off a dying platform without dropping the catalog
Magento 2.4.x was past end-of-life: no security patches, agencies quoting rebuild prices for maintenance work, and a 19,508-product catalog with a decade of accumulated data quirks. We ran the migration as documented playbooks — platform assessment, data migration, SEO preservation — moving the full catalog, customer accounts, and order history to BigCommerce in ten weeks. Four customer groups with institution-specific price lists came across intact, because they were about to matter enormously.
“The migration wasn't the project. It was the foundation for the project.”
Replacing the middleware toll booth
Hospitals, universities, and research labs don't buy from websites — they buy through procurement systems: Prendio, Ariba, Coupa, Jaggaer. Connecting a store to those networks traditionally means punchout middleware: annual fees, per-connection charges, and roughly six-week onboarding per buyer institution. The middleware vendor sits between you and your own customers. What we built instead: a native, multi-tenant cXML 1.2.040 punchout server on Azure, owned and operated by Fowara.
- A buyer clicks MedSupply inside their procurement system, which fires a cXML PunchOutSetupRequest at the server.
- The server authenticates it, resolves the buyer to their BigCommerce customer group, and signs them into the storefront — landing on contract pricing, not retail.
- The buyer shops normally, then transfers the cart back to their procurement system as a cXML PunchOutOrderMessage.
- When the PO is approved, the OrderRequest arrives and becomes a BigCommerce order automatically — idempotent, so retries never duplicate orders.
- Every step is audit-logged. When a buyer's procurement team asks "what happened to PO #4471," the answer takes seconds.
Why native beats middleware:
Cost
Speed
Ownership
Multi-tenancy
Scaling up without starting over
As institutional demand grew, MedSupply moved to BigCommerce Enterprise. With an embedded CTO who already owned the architecture, the upgrade was a decision, not a discovery project: no re-quoting, no knowledge transfer, no new vendor learning the catalog. The same retainer that ran the migration and built the punchout server ran the Enterprise move. This is what the fractional model looks like over seven years — platform decisions compound instead of resetting with each vendor.