>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas It's The Cube covering Adobe Summit 2019 brought to you by Adobe. >> Hello everyone, welcome back to The Cube's live coverage here in Las Vegas for Adobe Summit 2019. I'm John Furrier with Jeff Frick. Our next guest is Jason Woosley, Vice President of Commerce Product and Platform for Adobe, part of the big keynote display this morning and news on the announcement of the Commerce Cloud, formerly Magento. Congratulations. Welcome to The Cube. >> Hey, thanks so much for having me. It's great to be here. >> Love the commerce angle because now that's a big part of a journey, people buy stuff. >> Absolutely. >> That's the most important, one of the most important parts. >> So when you think about an experience end to end, right it culminates hopefully in a transaction, and that's one of the pieces that makes the Magento acquisition fit so well into the Adobe family. We actually kind of finished that last mile of the transition getting to actual ownership. >> You know, I love this event because it feels a little like Woodstock, as Steve Lucas said on stage because you've got the best of big data all the intoxicating conversations and discussions. You get the best of the cloud, all the geek stuff under the hood. >> Oh, yeah. >> Then you've got the applications which are super relevant. So, it's really kind of, I love the content, love that you guys are in the middle of, I think, a great wave of innovation coming. But if you look at the big picture, you're seeing the same kind of themes, latency, relevance. I mean, these are tech terms used on your product in commerce a lot different than other things. So, you start to see these geek terms kind of weaving into this new cloud. >> I think you're really starting to see a convergence of some of the terminology and what really matters and that's the customer experience, right. It's really about answering what the customer wants and getting that is, that's the magic. >> It's accepting the fact that it's a disjointed journey. I love the journey conversation but it's not the straight pipe like it used to be. You're in and out, you're looking on a website, you're jumping over from a tweet, you know, there's so many kind of in's and out's, in's and out's, in's and outs before you get to that buy. >> And consumers are so sophisticated now, right. I mean they absolutely take advantage of all of those channels and that's why it's so important for merchants who are trying to be relevant. You've got to be present at every point where your customers are and it's a tough thing to do because there's just a proliferation of channels, I mean, you know, we've got digital kiosks, we've got buy online pick up in store, all these omnichannels operations coming together now. So it becomes even more important for merchants to make that investment and make sure that not only are they at the place where their customers are but they're there with a relevant and personalized message. >> Jason, I've got to ask you a question. I bring this up in a lot of these kind of user experience conversations. When you have new things coming on the market that are hard to operationalize out of the gate. It takes some time. We're starting to see that with you guys that built the platform. People are starting to operationalize new capabilities. But on the consumer side, the user side, expectations become the new experience. It's kind of a cliche in the tech world. What are some of those experiences that you're seeing that's becoming the new expectations. To your point about, the old way, I can smell a marketing funnel a mile away. I'm trying to buy something and all this other distractions that are not relevant to me are there. So you start to see some frustration but now users expect something new. What is that expectation that's converting it to experience? >> It's across the board and expectation are sky high, right. And it seems like every time we see something innovative you think about Amazon Prime, right, two day shipping. That was crazy back in the day and now, two day shipping is considered standard shipping, right. If you wanna be fast, you're doing same day. And that kind of, it's so hard to keep up with that pace of innovation and it happens all over the place. It's not just in logistics. People are expecting to be able to take advantage of omnichannel operations, right. Millennials especially. 60% of them really prefer to be able to have a tangible interaction with the product before they buy it. But they still want to buy online. So now they do buy online pick up in store or click and collect, they call it in Europe. And it's just become a huge fad. We've seen a 250% increase of the largest retailers of buy online pick up in store in the last year. Absolutely crazy. >> It's pretty wild when Best Buy gets on stage and says, we're not a brick and mortar retailer. (laughing) >> It actually changes the game, right. What else is interesting though is these brick and mortars that have an online presence, they actually have a distinct advantage because of that tangibility, right. You've got the opportunity to do all of your shopping online but you've also got a place to go do showcasing and actually interact with some of those especially more high tech tools. >> Right. >> You guys have been out front on the Magento side. We covered your event last year for the acquisition. And a couple things popped out at me that I want to get your reaction to now. One is obviously the role of the community. But as you started getting into the cloud kind of play the economics are changing, too, right. So you have community, economics and then large scale. These are new table stakes. So what's your reaction to that? How is Adobe and how are your customers adjusting to this new normal? Your thoughts on this shift? >> Yeah, I think that they adjust faster than we expect them to. It's really interesting because as you see these demands for things like cloud operations. Really, that's taking a whole set of responsibilities away from the merchant and allowing a single vendor to provide that as a service and we're seeing that again and again, right. This service based economy that's just becoming much, much more prevalent. What it means for our community and I'm glad you brought that up because our commerce community is the largest in the world, it's highly engaged. We have a tremendous amount of participation from those guys. And they're actually helping lead the way. They help merchants feel good about adopting new technologies. They're also incredibly innovative and they take our product and do things that we would never have thought of. >> They provide product feedback, too, the developers, that creates a nice fly wheel. >> It is a great fly wheel. >> It's a great use case. Congratulations, you guys done some nice work there. >> Oh, thanks, thanks. >> And Adobe's certainly gonna get the benefits of that. The other question I wanna ask you is something I noticed on digital over the years is that, it's gotten more prevalent now that everyone's connected. You know, the old days of buying tech. Let's buy this great project, we'll build it out and multiple year payback and everyone nerds out. It's like a project and they have fun doing it. And then, like, what was the value. When the value today is about money. When people lose money, the friction, all those other kinds of coolness, the shiny new toy, it goes away. >> Yeah, it falls away. >> You're in the middle of that. You see more of that now. People whose businesses are on the line. Security breach or revenue. >> Jason: Yeah. >> I mean, the optimization around the new way just goes right to the problem right there. >> The very best way to tackle that is an iterative experimental way. You've go to be able to make small bets. Learn from those bets and then pivot. This concept that we can take an idea, go into our back rooms and code it for three years and come back out with something that meets the market, it's a fallacy. It's never gonna work, right? So you've gotta start delivering shippable increments much faster, smaller pieces and then make sure that you've got that feedback loop closed so that you can actually respond to your customers. >> Jeff: Right, the other piece which you just talked on briefly but I wanna unpack it in reference to what you just said, two big words. Open source and ecosystem. >> Jason: Yeah. >> And as you said, you can't just go in the back room. Even if you knew the product, you can't necessarily go in the back room and build it yourself. >> Jason: Yeah. >> Fundamentally, believe that not all the experts are in your four walls and that there's, by rule, a lot more outside and leveraging that capability is really a game-changer. >> Yeah, absolutely, I mean, we have three hundred thousand developers that call themselves Magento engineers and don't take a paycheck from Adobe. It's phenomenal what they're able to do and they help us move very, very quickly. We saw last year when the Amazon patent expired for one-click checkout on the day that it expired one of our community members created a pool request that made every Magento store able to take advantage of it. >> John: They were probably waiting right there on that clock. >> Oh no, they were waiting. (John laughing) Because the licensing fees were extortion. >> That's innovation. >> It is. >> That's our example of community driven innovation. >> And that's a great place to go get that, right. Within your four walls, you've got lots of expertise but you always end up with some blinders on. We've got profit margins to go chase. We've got all kinds of good business things to go do. The community, however, completely unfettered. They've got the ability to go try all kinds of cool stuff. >> Two questions on that thread. One is community. A lot of people try the buzzword. Hey, let's get a community. You can't buy a community. You've got to earn it. Talk about that dynamic and then talk about how Adobe's reacted to Magento's community because Adobe's pretty open. >> Yeah. >> They're creatives. I don't think they'd be anti-community. They have developers. They got a bunch of community themselves. So, community, buying a community versus earning it, and then the impact of Magento's community to Adobe. >> You cannot buy it. 100% you cannot buy a community. And you have to deserve it. And really, you have to think about yourselves as custodians of a community rather than, I mean, we're members. We used to have this saying, we are Magento. Everybody inside Magento, in the ecosystem, our partners, our developers. Everybody is part of that solution so trying to own it, trying to exert control over it, it's a recipe for not having it at all, right. So you have to be very cautious and it really is a custodianship. It's an honor and it's a privilege and you have to kind of take it seriously. >> If you get it right, the benefits are multi-fold. >> That's exactly it. >> Now, Adobe, obviously they have, we heard and we see that they're open to that and working with it. >> Adobe has been terrific and it was, I think, one of the biggest fears from our community as acquisition unfolded was hey, Adobe, big corporate company not a lot of open source projects. They've got some but their core isn't about open source and what was gonna happen to our community as we came in. It's been absolutely terrific because Adobe has been absolutely investing and making sure that we continue to be terrific custodians of this community and in fact, they're trying now to expand that community to the rest of their products. They would love to have our community members that are able to go out and innovate so rapidly, do so across the entire Adobe portfolio. >> Well, it's interesting, too. If you have a platform play in the cloud scale and some of these cross functional connection tissue points that's recipe for robust ecosystem development. >> Exactly. >> Because they means there's white space, there's opportunities to build on top of. That's a platform. >> Right, and you will see innovation and ingenuity from that you'll never expect. It's just phenomenal. >> So I'm curious to get your take on a specific feature I wanna dive into which is dynamic pricing. Right, hotels have been doing dynamic pricing forever. You give the authorization to the kid working at the front counter if it's 11 o'clock, you got a open room take whatever walks in the door. >> Jason: Yeah. >> To the airline, it's got very sophisticated but most companies haven't really be able to excuse dynamic pricing. Just curious, when you bring in capabilities that you get now with the Adobe suite and the data now that you have around the customer and the data that you now have around the context, I mean, are we gonna see much better execution of things like dynamic pricing. >> We're gonna see democratization of a lot of those things that were typically reserved to the very, very big industries, right. I think you're looking at airlines, they did a great job. But they invested hundreds of millions of dollars into systems to go do that. Now, with things like Sensei and artificial intelligence our machine learning capabilities, we can actually bring those capabilities to small merchants and everyday folks to go out and do those experiments with your pricing and understand where you have elasticity and where you don't. Once you have that information, you're making much better decisions across the board for your business. >> And that's actually the benefits of the Magento platform and scale that you have. So the question is, as you guys continue to get this cloud scale going, what are some of the platforms priorities for you guys? What product areas you looking at? What white spaces are gonna leap for the ecosystem? Can you share a little insight into what you guys are thinking? >> Yeah, I mean, one, we try to open everything to the ecosystem. There's really not a lot of advantage for us to have anything that's super closed off and secret sauce. We try to make sure that everything is available and so what you'll see is investments in things like SDK's. An SDK is software development kit basically lets you use any language, any tool that you're comfortable with to go ahead and integrate, extend and contribute to our core capabilities. You'll see us continue to invest in making sure that everybody that wants to participate has a very, very easy path to do so. >> And in terms of the developer program, you mention SDK, what's your impression of that? Can you give an update? We're not really familiar with that much, we're learning Adobe. What do you guys have for developer programs within Adobe? >> Well, it is terrific. We have a project called Adobe I/O that actually does a terrific job at sort of standardizing the API and interfaces between all of the different components within the digital experience suite. So, you'll continue to see us investing in that. Certainly, commerce is gonna start participating in that Adobe I/O model and that's going to make it even more broadly available to these great folks. >> Even one of the things we had on The Cube today was a historic moment. We been doing this for 10 years, hundreds of shows a year. We had our first guest on, one of your customers from Metlite. His title was Marketing CIO and I'm like, okay. He's part of the global technology operations team of Metlite. But I think the bigger story there is that we think we'll be a bigger trend than just one-off. We think, we're seeing the connection between the IT world, data, developers, applications coming together where marketing is like a CIO. >> And it's exactly right. We look at the CMO and the CIO as two sides of the same coin. And more often than not they have the same objectives. They're coming at it from a slightly different perspective and so you really do end up having to marry the message so that it resonates not only with the IT folks and usually that's about cloud processes, ease of use, ease of deployment, low cost operation and then on the marketing side it's really about feature availability and visual merchandising and being able to bring their great products to life. >> And an interesting quote, he said, what's it like, to be a marketing CIO, share to others who might to be that. He goes, well, I'm kind of a matchmaker and a translator. (laughing) >> I think that's pretty good a way to put it. Yeah, that makes good sense. >> He puts projects together, translating jargon to business benefits. Emphasis was on the business. You got to know the business. We had Dollar Shape Club on earlier, another one of your Adobe's customers. They were like, no, we need to know the business. It's about the data, data processing, the data systems, business. It has to be blended. It's the art and science of business and technology. >> Yeah, the only get that right when you put the customer right in the middle. You have to build all of those business processes and all of those systems around what that customer's looking for. >> So I'm just curious, Jason, what's changed over the last couple of years, 'cos we've been talking about the 360 view of the customer since, I don't when, but a while. >> A while, yeah. >> And we've been talking about omnichannel marketing and touching the customer for a while but it seems like we've hit a tipping point. Maybe I'm misreading the tealeaves but you know, what are the kind of critical factors that are making that much more a reality than just talk it was a couple years back? >> Well, on omnichannel, we're certainly seeing a maturity, an understanding of what it takes to do omnichannel. It's not just a commerce operation. omnichannel actually stretches back into your supply chain. To be able to really think about the way you deliver to customers as a single channel. Your supply chain has to be highly flexible. Your logistic capabilities have to be extremely flexible and they have to be able to tuned for the things that are important to your customers. Either speed of delivery or cost of delivery. All of those kinds of things. In the omnichannel space, I think we're finally starting to see the maturity of, okay, how do we make these things real. And that's critically important. And the other one. >> 360, 360 view of the customer. >> 360 view of the customer. Almost the same thing there, right. We're finally seeing the technology start to catch up and the big challenge there was we always had one view or the other. You either had a behavioral view of your customer, how they interact with your content. Or you had this great transactional view, the dollar and cents behind a relationship. Now, we're starting to see companies especially like Adobe, that have made these incredible investments to bring those two houses of data together, and that really starts to tell the full story. Again, going back to that customer journey, you need to be able to observe that entire journey in order to make those kinds of decisions. >> Jason, I wish we had more time. I wanna get one more question. I know we might wanna break here. Maybe we can follow up as a separate conversation in Palo Alto. You know, having a digital footprint you hear that buzzword, I'll get a digital footprint out there. It makes a lot of sense but a world that has been dominated by silos, it's hard to have footprint when you have siloed entities. So, in your mind, your reaction between something that's foundational and then data silos. Maybe silos could be okay at the app level but what's the foundational footprint? I mean, foundation's everything. >> Jason: It is. >> Without a foundation, you clearly can't build on. >> Yeah, and we talked a little bit about the Adobe experience platform this morning. Eric Shantenu and Anje will come on and talk about, we've got this amazing capability now to really take that data, standardize it and make it available for all kinds of systems and processes. And I think that's where you're going to see the real foundation for all of these siloed efforts. It's gonna be in this kind of common data understanding, what they call a XDM. >> And customers got silos, too. They've got agencies. All kinds of things out there. >> Absolutely. >> Data everywhere. Jason, thanks for coming on. We really appreciate it. >> Hey, guys, I really appreciate it. Thanks so much. >> Jason Woosley on The Cube here at Adobe Summit 2019. I'm John Furrier. Day one of two days of wall-to-wall live coverage. Stay with us for more coverage after this short break. (electronic music)