>> Announcer: From Seattle, Washington it's The Cube covering AWS Imagine. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with The Cube. We're here in downtown Seattle at the AWS Imagine Education Conference. It's the second year of the conference. It's really successful so much now they have another education conference, excuse me, Imagine Conference coming up for nonprofits, but this is the education one. About 800 people and we're excited to have, I think they had representatives from like 40 countries here. It's amazing, such a small conference with such great global representation. We've got our first guest, all the way from Valencia, Spain. He is Inaki Bilbao Estrada and the Vice Chancellor for Internationalization and Innovation at the CEU Universidad Cardenal Herrera. It's a mouthful, welcome. >> Thank you very much. >> So first off, impressions from the show, from the keynotes this morning. >> It was very impressive, the keynote by Andrew Co Intersession by Amazon. We were impressed, we were included in the keynote and we are very proud of having been included in the keynote for our Alexa skill. >> Great, so before we get into kind of what they talked about, let's back up a few steps in terms of what you are trying to accomplish as an institution. So give us a little bit of background on the college, how big it was, and kind of what was going on and what you wanted to really do differently. >> We are a Spanish University. We belong with CEU San Pablo Foundation which owns three universities in Spain, Barcelona, Madrid, and Valencia. We are a not for profit universities and in Valencia, in our case, we are very proud that we used to be a local university with only 300 international students eight years ago and right now we have reached 2500 international students which represents around 30-33% of the population of the university. We are right now 8000 undergraduate students and 3000 graduate students. >> So that's pretty amazing. So as you said, you were really kind of a regional university and you decided you wanted more international students. Why did you want more international students and then once you made that goal, what were some of the major objectives at the beginning of this process or problems that you had to overcome? >> It was a trend in higher education institutions but for us it was very important for two reasons, one the sustainability of the university, but also and I think the main reason is that we wanted to have our students to have a global experience. We wanted to become a global university based in Valencia, but we have right now more than 80 countries represented on campus. >> Wow, so what were some of the big hurdles that you saw that were going to get in the way of attracting more of these international students? >> So it was very important for us to adapt all our processes to our students. For this we have a very helpful firm partnered on campus. It was the IT department with Jose Roch in charge of this department and through technology we have been able to escalate and automate, get the automation of all of this process in order to reach bigger number of international students. So we have adapted all the processes to the needed of our international students, our new population of international students. >> Right, so you were highlighted today for a very specific thing, for a very specific device, which is Alexa, and voice as an interface and we saw some of the Alexa stuff last year, in terms of the kids asking it, you know, when is my test, is my homework due, these types of things, but you guys are actually taking it to the next level. Explain to the folks what you guys have done with Alexa. >> So we have used Alexa to introduce a virtual assistant for all our students national and international students and one other things that have been highlighted in the keynote is that is not only in English, but also in Spanish. Like this we are covering the two most speaked language on campus, English and Spanish. >> So it's bi, so you've got a bilingual Alexa in the room. >> Yeah, yeah, yeah. So for us it was very important as explained before that technologies had been asked to cover all the population of students, not only part of them. >> Right and using English is kind of universal language, regardless of what their native tongue is. >> Yeah, yeah. >> So did you have to build all this from scratch? How much was Amazon helping you to do the English to Spanish translation, was it written in Spanish, how did some of those logistics work out? >> So we began six months ago with the project with the help of Amazon, they were very, very, very helpful for us. With Ana Cabez and Juan Manuel Gomez from the UK team of Amazon and they guided us how to develop the Alexa skills for the goals that we set with them, what we wanted to achieve with the virtual assistant for our students. >> And yeah, so the skills are the things that you actually write, so how many different skills did you write especially for your students? >> So we, what we are doing is to build only one, but we are integrating all the services in one only skill. So we are integrating services related with what my next assignment on Blackboard, which are my grades, how can I book a room in the library or another space of the university, locations of the different services or professors of the university. We are integrating a lot of services, but in one skill because we don't want the students to have to switch between skills. >> Jeff: Right, right. >> So we're aiming to have one virtual assistant for the students in only one skill. >> So that's interesting, I didn't even think about all the integration points that you have. But you've got integration points in all these other systems. The room booking services, the library services, Blackboard and the other educational services. >> The learning management system. >> So how many points of integration are there? >> A lot we are working right now, we are focusing around five, seven integration points, because also we are integrating it with our CRM in order to have personalized message to different segments of our students, depending of if they are due to get some documentation to the registrar office. We think that integration with CRM allows us to give personalized message and notification to our students depending on the situations. >> Jeff: Right. >> So it's not a general notification for all of the students on campus. >> Right, that's awesome. Again, highlighted in the keynote really I think is the first kind of bilingual implementation of Alexa. So that's terrific. I want to shift gears a little bit about innovation and transformation. We go to a lot of tech shows, talk to a lot of big companies, everybody wants to digitally transform and innovate. Traditionally education hasn't been known as the most progressive industry in terms of transforming. You said right off the bat, that's your job is about transformation and innovation. Where's that coming from? Is that from the competitive world in which you live? Is that a top-down leadership directive? What's kind of pushing basically the investment in this innovation around your guys' school? >> So I believe that education can be disrupt in the next five, ten years. So what we think at the university is that we have to be closer to this disruption and in this sense we are working a lot to improve the students' experience of our students on campus because if not we think that it makes no sense to study on campus when you can go online. >> Jeff: Right. >> So that's why we're using technology to improve the students' experience on campus. So we are trying to avoid those things that have no value added for the students through technology and through the digital transformation. In order that we have more time for these value added interaction between the staff, academic and nonacademic staff, with the students. >> Right, and then how has the reception been with the staff, both the academic staff and the nonacademic staff because clearly the students are your customers, your primary customer, but they're a customer as well. So how have they embraced this and got behind it? >> So I seen all the institutions and you have a part of the institution that is not so in favor of these innovations, but the big number of professors and staff have seen the benefits of not to have to answer email Saturday night because the virtual assistant is 24 hours seven days a week. So they've seen the benefits of how technology can give them more time for these value added interaction with their students. For this in order to avoid only top-down decisions we have created digital ambassador programs which this program what we do is to share with our professors and with our nonacademic staff what we are planning and how they see the project. >> Jeff: Right, right. >> And we are integrating their opinions and their suggestions in the program. >> So you're six months into it you said since you launched it. >> Yeah. >> Okay, I'm just curious if you could share any stories, biggest surprises, things that you just didn't expect. I always like long and unintended consequences, you know, as you go through this process. >> So one of things is in Spain, Alexa was launched in November, last November so it's very new. >> Jeff: Very new. >> Very new in Spain. There's no voice assistant in the last nine months, it have exploded, but we didn't have before. So the students have been very impressed that the university were working at this level with the technology so new because it was even new for them, even if they are younger and they knew a lot about this technology. They were impressed that the university so quickly reacted to the introduction of the technology. The other point is through innovation, we are also using Alexa for the digital transformation of learning and teaching. We have launched an innovation program for quizzes for the students. And we have the huge amount of volunteers that they want to see how it works. >> Right, right, just curious too, to get your take on voice as an interface. You made an interesting comment before we turned the cameras on that email just doesn't work very well for today's kids. They don't use it. They're not used to using it. But voice still seems to really be lagging. I get an email from Google every couple of days saying, here ask your Google Assistant this or ask your Alexa this, you know, we still haven't learned it. From where you're sitting and seeing kind of this new way to interact and as you said get away from these emails in the middle of the night that ask, when's my paper due and I could ask the assistant. How do you see that evolving? Are you excited about it? Do you see voice as really the centerpieces of a lot of these new innovations or is it just one of many things that you're working on? >> So I think the difference is that usually higher education institutions would have use of email for communication with students with so massive amount of emails. I think what they feel with the voice assistants is that they have the freedom to choose what they want to know or not to know. So if they can ask voice, virtual assistant, as in one case, they have the freedom when they want the information. >> Jeff: Right. >> So I think its a big difference between emails, in an email you decide when you send the information to the students, with voice technologies, the student, it's the student who is asking when they want the information. >> Jeff: Right. >> So I think it's important for them. >> It's huge because they never ask for the email. >> No, they, and after they tell us that it wasn't important information that they didn't check the email. >> Right. >> They complain that they don't have the right information. >> Right, well Inaki, thank you for sharing your story and congratulations on this project. Sounds like you're just getting started, you've got a long ways to go. >> Thank you so much. >> All right, thank you. He's Inaki, I'm Jeff. You're watching the Cube, we're in downtown Seattle at AWS Imagine Education Conference. Thanks for watching. See you next time. 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>> From Times Square, in the heart of New York City, it's theCUBE. Covering Imagine 2018. Brought to you by, Automation Anywhere. >> Welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in Manhattan, New York City, at Automation Anywhere's Imagine Conference 2018. About 1,100 professionals really talking about the future of work bots, and really how automation is gonna help people do the mundane a little bit easier, and hopefully free us all up to do stuff that's a little bit more important, a little higher value. We're excited to have our next guest, he's Craig Le Clair, the VP and Principal Analyst from Forrester, and he's been covering this space for a long time. Craig, great to see ya. >> Yeah, nice to see you, thanks for having me on. >> So, first off, just kind of general impressions of the event? Have you been to this before? It's our first time. >> Yes, I did a talk here last year, so it was a little bit smaller then. There's obviously more people here today, but it's pretty much, I think it was in Brooklyn last year. >> It was in Brooklyn, okay. >> So, this is an upgrade. >> So, RP Robotic Process Automation, more affectionately, probably termed as bots. >> Yeah. >> They're growing, we're seeing more and more time and our own interactions with companies, kind of on the customer service side. How are they changing the face of work? How are they evolving as really a way for companies to get more leverage? >> Yeah, so I'll make one clarification of your sentence, and that's, you know, bots do things on behalf of people. What we're talking to in a call center environment is a chat bot. So, they have the ability to communicate or really, I would say, attempt to communicate with people. They're not doing a very good job of it in my view. But, bots work more in the background, and they'll do things for you, right? So, you know, they're having a tremendous effect. I mean, one of the statistics I was looking at the other day, per one billion dollars of revenue, the average company had about 150 employees in finance and accounting ten years ago. Now, instead of having 120 or 130, it's already down to 70 or 80, and that's because the bots that we're talking about here can mimic that human activity for posting to a general ledger, for switching between applications, and really, move those folks on to different occupations, shall we say. >> Right, right. >> Yeah. >> Well it's funny, Jeff Immelt just gave his little keynote address, and he said, "This is the easiest money you'll find in digital transformation is implementing these types of technology." >> Yeah, it's a good point, and it was a great talk, by the way, by Jeff. But, you know, companies have been under a lot of pressure to digitally transform. >> Right. >> You know, due to really the mobile, you know, mobile peaked around 2012, and that pushed everyone into this gap that companies couldn't really deal with the consumer technology that was out there, right? So then you had the Ubers of the world and digital transformation. So, there's been a tremendous focus on digital transformation, but very little progress. >> Right. >> When we do surveys, only 11% are showing any progress at all. So, along comes this technology, Robotic Process Automation that allows you to build bots without changing any of the back end systems. There's no data integration. You know, there's no APIs involved. There's no big transformation consultants flying in. There's not even a Requirements Document because you're gonna start with recording the actual human activity at a work station. >> Right. >> So, it's been an elixir, you know, frankly for CIOs to go into their boss and say, "You know what, we're doing great, you know, I've just made this invoice process exist in a lot better way." You know, we're on our path to digital transformation. >> And it's really a different strategy, because, like you said, it's not kind of rip and replace the old infrastructure, you're not rewriting a lot of applications, you're really overlaying it, right? >> Which is one of the potential downfalls is that, you know, sometimes you need to move to that new cloud platform. You don't want, to some extent, the technology institutionalizes what could be a very bad process, one that needs to be modernized, one that needs to be blown up. You know, we're still using the airline reservation systems from 1950s, and layers, and layers, and layers and layers built upon them. At some point, you're gonna have to design a new experience with new technology, so there's some dangers with the seduction of building bots against core systems. >> Right, so the other thing that's happening is the ongoing, I love Moore's Law, it's much more about an attitude then the physics of a microprocessor, but you know, compute, and store, and networking, 5Gs just around the corner, cloud-based systems now really make that available in a much different way, and as you said, mobile experience delivers it to us. So as those continue to march on and asymptomatically approach zero and infinite scale, we're not there yet, but we're everyday getting a little bit closer. Now we're seeing AI, we're seeing machine-learning, >> Yes. >> We're seeing a new kind of class of horsepower, if you will, that just wasn't available before at the scale it's at today. So, now you throw that into the mix, these guys have been around 14 years, how does AI start to really impact things? >> It's a fascinating subject and question. I mean, we're, at Forrester, talking about the forces of automation. And, by the way, RPA is just a subset of a whole set of technologies: AI, you mentioned, and AI is a subset of automation, and there's Deep Learning, is a subset of AI and you go on and on, there are 30, 40 different automation technologies. And these will have tremendous force, both on jobs in the future, and on shifting control really to machines. So, right now, you can look at this little bubble we had of consumer technology and mobile, shifting a lot of power to the consumer, and that's been great for our convenience, but now with algorithms being developed that are gonna make more and more decisions, you could argue that the power is going to shift back to those who own the machines, and those who own the algorithms. So, there's a power shift, a control shift that we're really concerned about. There's a convergence of the physical and digital world, which is IOT and so forth, and that's going to drive new scale in companies, which are gonna further dehumanize some of our life, right? So that affects, it squeezes humans out of the process. Blockchain gets rid of intermediaries that are there to really transfer ideas and money and so forth. So, all of these forces of automation, which we think is gonna be the next big conversation in the industry, are gonna have tremendous effect societally and in business. >> Right. Well, there's certainly, you know, there's the case where you just you can't necessarily rescale a whole class of an occupation, right? The one that we're all watching for, obviously, is truck drivers, right? Employs a ton of people, autonomous vehicles are right around the corner. >> Right. >> On the other hand, there's going to be new jobs that we don't even know what they're gonna be yet, to quote all the graduating seniors, it's graduation season, most of them are going to work in jobs that don't even exist 10 years from now. >> Correct, correct, very true. >> And the other thing is every company we talk to has got tons of open reqs, and they can't get enough people to fulfill what they need, and then Mihir, I think touched on an interesting point in the keynote, where, ya know, now we're starting to see literal population growth slow down in developed countries, >> Yes. >> Like in Japan is at the leading edge, and you mentioned Europe, and I'm not sure where the US is, so it's kind of this interesting dichotomy: On one side, machines are going to take more and more of our jobs, or more and more portions of our job. On the other hand, we don't have people to do those jobs necessarily anyway, not necessarily today, but down the road, and you know, will we get to more of this nirvana-state where people are being used to do higher-value types of activities, and we can push off some of this, the crap and mundane that still, unfortunately, takes such a huge portion of our day to day world? >> Yeah, yeah. So, one thought that some of us believe at Forrester, I being one of them, is that we're at a, kind of, neutral right point now where a lot of the AI, which is really the most disruptive element we're talking about here, our PA is no autonomous learning capability, there's no AI component to our PA. But, when AI kicks in, and we've seen evidence of it as we always do first in the consumer world where it's a light version of AI in Netflix. There's no unlimited spreadsheets sitting there figuring out which one to watch, right? They're taking in data about your behavior, putting you in clusters, mapping them to correlating them, and so forth. We think that business hasn't really gotten going with AI yet, so in other words, this period that you just described, where there seems to be 200,000 people hired every month in the ADP reports, you know, and there's actually 50,000 truck driver jobs open right now. And you see help-wanted signs everywhere. >> Right, right. >> We think that's really just because business hasn't really figured out what to do with technology yet. If you project three or four years, our projections are that there will be a significant number of, particular in the cubicles that our PA attacks, a significant number of dislocation of current employment. And that's going to create this job transformation, we think, is going to be more the issue then replacement. And if you go back in history, automations have always led to transformation. >> Right. >> And I won't go through the examples because we don't have time, but there are many. And we think that's going to be the case here in that automation dividends, we call them, are going to be, are being way underestimated, that they're going to be new opportunities, and so forth. The skills mis-match is the issue that, you know, you have what RPA attacks are the 60 million that are in cubicles today in the US. And the average education there is high school. So, they're not gonna be thrown out of the cubicles and become data scientists overnight, right? So, there's going to be a massive growth in the gig economy, and there's an informal and a formal segment of that, that's going to result in people having to patch together their lives in ways they they hadn't had before, so there's gonna be some pain there. But there are also going to be some strong dividends that will result from this level of productivity that we're gonna see, again, in a few years, cause I think we're at a neutral point right now. >> Well, Amara's Law doesn't get enough credit, right? We overestimate in the short-term, and then underestimate the long-term needs affect. >> Absolutely. >> And one of the big things on AI is really moving from this, in real time, right? And all these fast databases and fast analytics, is we move from a world where we are looking in the rear view mirror and making decisions on what happened in the past to you know, getting more predictive, and then even more prescriptive. >> Yes. >> So, you know, the value unlock there is very very real, I'm never fascinated to be amazed by how much inefficiency there still is every time we go to these conferences. (Craig laughs) You know we thought we solved it all at SAP and ERP, that was clearly-- >> Clearly not the case. Funny work to do. >> But, it's even interesting, even from last year, you mentioned that there the significant delta just from year to year is pretty amazing. >> Yes, I've been amazed at the level of innovation in the core digital worker platforms, the RPA platforms, in the last year has been pretty amazing work. What we were talking about a year ago when I spoke at this conference, and what we're talking about now, the areas are different. You know, we're not talking about basic control of the applications of the desktop. We're talking about integration with text analytics. We're talking about comp combining process mining information with desktop analytics to create new visions of the process. You know, we weren't talking about any of that a year ago. We're talking about bot stores. They're out there, and downloadable robots. Again, not talking about last year at all. So, just a lot of good progress, good solid progress, and I'm very happy to be a part of it. >> And really this kind of the front end scene of so much of the development is manifested on the front end, where we used to always talk about citizen developers back in the day. You know, Fred Luddy, who was just highlighted Service Now, most innovative company. That was his, you know, vision of Citizen Developer. And then we've talked about citizen integrators, which is really an interesting concept, and now we're talking about really citizens, or analysts, having the ability via these tools to do integrations and to deliver new kind of work flows that really weren't possible before unless you were a hardcore programmer. >> Yeah, although I think that conversation is a little bit premature in this space, right? I think that most of the bot development requires programming skills today, and they're going to get more complicated in that most of the bot activities today are doing, you know, three decisions or less. Or they're looking at four or five apps that are involved, or they're doing a series of four or five hundred clicks that they're emulating. And the progression is to get the digital workers to get smarter and incorporating various AI components, so you're going to have to build, be able to deal statistically with algorithm developments, and data, and learning, and all of that. So, it's not.... The core of this, the part of it that's going to be more disruptive to business is going to be done by pretty skilled developers, and programmers, and data scientists, and statistical, you know, folks that are going through. But, having said that, you're going to have a digital workforce that's got to be managed, and you know, has to be viewed as an employee at some level to get the proper governance. So you have to know when that digital worker was born, when they were hired, who do they report to, when were they terminated, and what their performance review is. You gotta be doing performance reviews on the digital workers with the kind of dashboard analytics that we have. And that's the only way to really govern, because the distinction in this category is that you're giving these bots human credentials, and you're letting them access the most trusted application boundaries, areas, in a company. So, you better treat them like employees if you want proper governance. >> Which becomes tricky as Mihir said when you go from one bot to ten bots to ten thousand. Then the management of this becomes not insignificant. >> Right. >> So Craig, I want to give you the last word. You said, you know, big changes since last year. If we sit down a year from now, 2019, _ Oh. >> Lord knows where we'll be. What are we gonna talk about? What do you see as kind of the next, you know, 12-month progression? >> You know, I hope we don't go to Jersey after Brooklyn, New York, and-- >> Keep moving. >> I see Jersey over there, but it's where it belongs, you know, across the river. I'm from Jersey, so I can say that. You know, I think next year we're gonna see more integration of AI modules into the digital worker. I think with a lot of these explosive markets, like RPA is, there's always a bit of cooling off period, and I think you're going to see some tapering off of the growth of some of the platform companies, AA, but also their peers and compatriots. That's natural. I think that the area has been a little bit, you know, analysis and tech-industry loves change. If there's no change, there's nothing for us to write about. So, we usually over-project. Now, in this case, the 2.8 billion-dollar market project five years out that I did is being exceeded, which is rare. But I expect some tapering off in a year where there's not a ceiling hit, but that, you know, you end up with going through these more simple applications that can be robotized easily. And now you're looking at slightly more complicated scenarios that take a little more, you know, AI and analytics embedded-ness, and require a little more care, they have a little more opaque, and a little more thought, and that'll slow things down a bit. But, I still think we're on our way to a supermarket and a lot of productivity here. >> So just a little less low-hanging fruit, and you gotta step up the game a little bit. >> I guess you could, you said it much simpler then I did. >> I'm a simple guy, Craig. >> But that's why you're the expert on this panelist. >> Alright, Craig, well thanks for sharing your insight, >> Alright. >> Really appreciate it, and do look forward to talking to you next year, and we'll see if that comes true. >> Alright, appreciate it, take care now. >> He's Craig Le Clair and I'm Jeff Frick. You're watching theCUBE from Automation Anywhere Imagine 2018.

(upbeat music) >> Narrator: Live from the Wynn Hotel in Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Magento Imagine 2018. Brought to you by Magento. >> Hey, welcome back to theCUBE. We are at the Wynn, Las Vegas with Magento at their Imagine 2018 Conference 3000 plus people here, really cool day we've been talking about all things commerce and digital commerce innovation. Excited to be joined by Peter Sheldon, the VP of Strategy from Magento, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thanks for having me, yeah. >> So this has been really fun, there's a lot of merchants behind us here in the marketplace, we've been talking to some of your customers who, a direct consumer, we just had Coca-Cola on. But we also see a lot of businesses here. Talk to us about what you guys are doing to help, not just the retailers, you started, right, being building this reputation as Magento, helping retailers to target online shoppers, but there's a lot more opportunity that you guys have been successful in, in the business, B2B space. Talk to us about, the vision, the strategy, on both sides. >> Yeah, so I think what's fascinating about Magento is their diversity of our client base, and I think it's a little bit of a testament to the flexibility and agility of the platform, but you're absolutely right, we started out primarily serving the B2C market, working with retailers, CPG firms, branded manufacturers and so forth, luxury goods. But commerce has really evolved and moved on, and I think what we see today is a lot of opportunity in B2B, and so when I think about B2B, these are typically manufacturers and distributors wholesalers who are looking to digitally transform their businesses, and really make the buying process more efficient. So whether it's a distributor who's buying products from a manufacturer, or an end-buyer might be a contractor, especially in home improvement, or something, who needs to buy tools and materials from either a manufacturer or distributor. Traditionally, it was a very traditional sort of, retail based buying experience. You would go to a branch, a distributor's branch face to face, engagement over sales person, or the sales rep would come visit you, and you would through a paper catalog. >> Relationship based. >> Relationship building. >> Exactly. >> And so forth, and that's a high cost of acquisition channel, and so I think what a lot of B2B firms are realizing is there's significant, first of all, there's demand from the buyers because all buyers have their consumer life as well, e-commerce is so mature and the B2C space with Amazon, that buyers are incredibly frustrated if in their business life they don't get that great ease of e-commerce experience, and instead they're still faxing and picking up the phone or even if it is a digital order entry experience, it's really terrible, and it's not intuitive to use, it's not easy to use. So, there's a real demand to digitize that ordering process, but more importantly, I think for B2B firms, there's some real operational savings and putting margin back into the bottom line by creating a lower cost of doing business and serving customers, and it's e-commerce and so I think we see one of the areas where a lot of firms first start out is in the spare parts business, so we work with a lot of manufacturers. It just makes so much sense to move their spare parts and warranty business online, so it's very easy to re-order spare parts, I don't need to pick up and call my sales rep to do that, I can do it in a digital manner. But I think what's really fascinating us is just the diversity of different B2B clients, their backgrounds, there's not a vertical that's immune to this. We see pharmaceutical companies, we see agriculture, we see traditional heavy manufacturing, light manufacturing, life sciences, you name it. And so the diversity of clients we see wanting to use our platform for digitizing their selling relationship that they have, it's really fascinating. >> We've heard a lot today that commerce is limitless, and it sounds like that's kind of what you're talking about, is that this day and age, every buyer is a consumer at some point, right, or everyday. We have these expectations, Amazon set the bar really high and every company to be successful has to be a technology company. So, from your standpoint as the VP of Strategy, some great exciting things have been announced at this year's Magento Imagine Conference. Share with us some of those, and especially I'm curious what you're seeing in the mobile space. >> Yeah, so mobile's really fascinating and I think it actually continues on to what we were talking about a moment ago in B2B. So, if we think about that B2B buyer, often the B2B buyer is an engineer, a contractor, a field service representative. They don't live in an office, they don't have ready, convenient access to either a laptop or desktop. They are out on a site, they are, if it's agriculture, they're out at a farm. >> In a field, yeah. >> Or in a field, or they're in a construction site, or they're inside a plant, and their primary means, or their only means of digital access is their smartphone. And typically they're having a slightly larger screen, phablet type smartphone, probably in a hard case if it gets dropped and so forth. But the way that they're going to engage with a brand digitally and to make a B2B commerce order, to look up the status of their order etc. It's not, we often talk about mobile first, it's not mobile first, it's mobile only. They don't have easy access anymore to desktop, laptop. If you're not serving them through mobile, they're not able to buy from you and they're going to buy from one of your competitors. And we see this thing across the board. Perhaps less so here in the US, but in some of the merging markets where we operate and where we have great success, markets like India. They again, it's very much a mobile only society now, and certainly in mainland China and other sort of emerging markets. So I think we're rapidly going down a path where if you think even in our day to day consumer lives, as we're thinking about making purchases, we're sitting on the couch, we're multitasking or watching television, but it's our phone that we're interacting with. >> Right. >> And if we think about the challenge today about buying through a phone, traditionally commerce purchase experience, it's really not that great. In fact in some cases it's pretty awful. Typical sort of page load time on a mobile can be five, six seconds, and as you want to navigate around using your thumb and scroll through and do some product research, every time you make an action, every time you touch that screen, the page reloads again, and it's actually frustratingly slow. If you actually get to the point of buying, obviously you've got to enter your shipping address, and that's just- >> Can imagine that conversion rates, and things and attrition. >> Exactly. And so- >> What have you guys done to change the game? >> Right, right exactly. So, those conversion rates on the mobile web today are pretty bad. They're about sort of, 1.7% and on a traditional desktop, it's 3.5% but yeah 70% of all traffic and visitors are coming on mobile devices, it's actually quite a profound sort of issue in the marketplace around us. So what are we doing about it? Well there's a really exciting new, and I call it technology, but it's really just a set of standards around open web technologies, Javascript, CSS, HTML, called PWA, or Progressive Web Apps. Now, Progressive Web Apps is not a proprietary technology, it's just open web technologies, but what's changed and evolved are the browsers themselves, so Chrome and Safari, Firefox, they've evolved and they now support what we call service workers, which is the ability for the browser to do more backbone processing. And the end result of all of this are a lot of brands are now rebuilding their websites away from responsive websites, which is the big investment we've had over the last five years to now building Progressive Web Apps. And a really nice thing about Progressive Web Apps is that they perform like a native app, they're very very fast, the page load times are typically around a second or so, and there's no refresh. Every navigation and action is almost instant gratification, so very fast, very slick to use. It feels like you're using an native app, but you're not, you're actually using a web experience in a browser. And so there's a couple of really important things for merchants around that. One, much, much better conversion rates. So all of the KPIs that a VP of e-commerce is ultimately responsible for, they're measured by there's a conversion rate, average order value, bounce rates. They all see significant improvements. And I never say there's some merchants always sort of facing a little bit of a dilemma, should we build native apps, or what should our native app strategy be? And the problem with native apps is they're incredibly expensive to develop, incredibly, a lot of maintenance with all the updates to iOS and Android. And many merchants really didn't see success because consumers will only download and give you real estate on their phones for an app that you really engage with on a very frequent, on a multiple times a day basis. Most of our customers are retailers that perhaps only have two or three transactions a year with their clients, with their end shoppers, and so a native app strategy just doesn't work. So the real exciting thing I think with merchants are, you can actually almost put the need for an app strategy to bed, they don't need one anymore. They invest there in PWA. So here at the conference we announce Magento's support for Progressive Web Apps. We've launched a new development toolkit we call the PWA Studio, and it's really a native capability for our merchants and our system integrators to be able to build Progressive Web Apps on the Magento platform. So we're super excited about it. >> Yeah, sounds super exciting and also really the consumer, the convenience is that consumers are demanding, and you're really reacting to the mobile only experience there. >> That's right. >> Has a huge potential, upside, for the merchants. How are you seeing that being used or use cases for that in the B2B space? >> Yeah, so if anything, it's almost kind of, more applicable in B2B than it is in B2C, although they're both going to adopt PWAs. So what's interesting about B2B is that there is a much more frequent transaction or interaction with the end buyer. B2B buyers are frequent purchasers, they are buying in bulk and they're making purchases perhaps multiple times a day, perhaps multiple times a week. And so they are power users and they do have a great deal of engagement with the brand, with their distributor, so again, it's starkly, I think the B2B firms have built native apps and have done so on top of Mangento, it's very easy to build a native app and integrate it into our Rest APIs etc. But again it's expensive and often it can be a seven figure front sum to initially develop an app strategy and to continue to maintain it, so there's a real there's a real TCO advantage of actually switching that strategy to do a PWA. The adoption can be higher because you don't need to install the app, and just the cost and support of building and supporting a PWA is significantly lower than a native app, and so again there's a lot of use cases for using PWAs in the B2B commerce space as well. >> Awesome. So besides what you announce with Progressive Web Apps, what are some of the exciting announcements you guys have made at Imagine? >> Yeah, so I think product announcements, we got an exciting new product we're calling Page Builder, it's a content management and page building tool. So what this really does is it allows the marketer merchandiser the real control over building and maintaining the pages on their site, and that's mobile web, mobile desktop and building able to do that, and it really alleviates any dependency on having to a front end developer where there's a true wiz with drag and drop capability, gives them complete creative to build very sophisticated content pages, but to do and have complete control over their publishing schedule, being able to preview that. So we're very excited about that. I think it empowers the marketers and merchandisers to be more creative and to get more done in the day, we're empowering them to be, act independently of needing to work with a front end developer. >> Awesome, and you guys speaking of developers, have a very large community. >> We do, we do. >> Of 300,000+ developers. >> It's quite incredible, I mean here at the conference, it's sort of their main annual get together of what we call the community. I'll come here to Las Vegas every year and to the Wynn and the community is here, and a lot of that community is made up of developers, and those developers, many of them work for our merchants, many of them work for system integrators, many of them work for other technology partners, and some are contractors, self-employed specialists and so forth. But as you say, that community is over 300,000 developers strong, that's 300,000 people who make a livelihood doing development on Magento. So it's really an amazing community, and they're incredibly passionate about Magento, and they contribute back to Magento. We are, have our roots as being an open source platform, one of the great differentiative benefits of that is that our community help us innovate and they help us, they contribute code, they contribute features and capabilities back into the platform that means that we can extend our R&D team to be this much, much greater force where we can develop new capabilities and deliver value to our clients at a far faster pace than any competitors do. So it's a really interesting aspect of our business. >> Well Peter, thanks for stopping by theCUBE and sharing the great announcements that you guys have made today and this week, and the direction you're able to go in and help take best practices and things learned in the consumer space, and apply it to businesses. We wish you the best of luck, and we look forward to being back at the Magento Imagine next year. >> Yeah, great. Love to have you back. Thanks so much for chatting with me today. >> Our pleasure. We wanted to thank you for watching theCUBE again, we are live at the Wynn in Las Vegas with Magento at Imagine 2018. I am Lisa Martin, stick around, we're back with one more guest after a short break. (upbeat music)