>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering Magento Imagine 2019, brought to you by Adobe. >> Welcome to the theCUBE, I'm Lisa Martin at The Wynn, in Las Vegas for Magento Imagine 2019. This is a three day event. You can hear a lot of exciting folks networking behind me, talking tech, talking e-commerce innovation and we're pleased to welcome fresh off the keynote stage a couple of guests from HP. We've got Gillian Campbell, the Head of Omni-channel Strategy and Operations. Gillian, thank you for joining us. >> Thank you for asking us. >> Our pleasure and Herriot Stobo, Director of Omni-channel Innovation and Solutions, also from HP. Welcome. >> Thank you very much. >> So Gillian fresh off the keynote stage, enjoyed your presentation this morning. >> Gillian: Thank you. >> Everybody I think in the world knows HP. Those of us consumers going, you know what actually, that reminds me, I need a new printer. >> We can help you. >> Thank you, excellent. Whether I'm shopping online or in a store. So you gave this really interesting keynote this morning talking about what HP is doing, starting at Apache. You really transform this shopping experience. Talk to us a little bit about HP, as I think you've mentioned it as a $50 billion start up and from a digital experience perspective, what you needed to enable. >> Yeah, so as I said, HP have been around for 80 years and in 2015, we became our own entity, HP Inc., and really started looking at how do we enable digital to be pervasive through everything that we do. Our internal processes are reached to customers and identified a great opportunity to really take leading edge and our digital commerce capabilities and we already had some early proof points and APG so we launched a global initiative and we're now on that journey to enable that best in class experience through the digital platforms. >> So Herriot talk to us about, you're based in Singapore. >> Yes. >> What were some of the market dynamics that really made it obvious that this is where we want to start building out this omni-channel strategy starting in Apache? Is it, you know whether, Gillian you mentioned it before. We started retail spaces, some being expensive. Is it more mobile experience and expectations on consumer's part? >> I think we've got a mix of different starting points across Asia. We've got some mega cities like Hong Kong and Singapore rising, Tokyo. And then we've got you know emerging markets across South-East Asia. We don't necessarily have any single market place that controls the entire market as we might see in other regions and so we've had a lot of runway to go and experiment and try new things. We also have an ecosystem of branded retail in Asia. Not in all markets, predominantly in India but also in some markets in South-East Asia that allow us to really blend the experience across both offline and online and to give customers choice at the end of the day. Let them decide how they want to shop and interact with our brand. So we have been running Magento 1 since we first launched our online store businesses in Indonesia and Thailand about six years ago and then we moved into China, replatformed, lexi-platform onto Magento 1 and then that was really the foundation of what we decided to go and build upon to become a global program. so we already had some proof points under our belt with Magento so. >> And what were some of those early wins that really started to make this really obvious that this omni-channel experience, the ability to give customers choice? Whether they want to start the process online, finish it in store, vice verse, or at least have the opportunity to have a choice? What were some of those early wins and business outcomes that you started to see? >> I think even just from because we're all, customers are people. Whether you're a corporate customer, a small business, or a consumer, we're all people and we all know that we shop that way. So essentially the storyline on that back to HP was we have to enable experiences that we would want to experience as well and it was quite a shift for a tech company who were really all about the products to be thinking about, well, how do we really enable that end to end experience? And as Herriot said, the runway was open. We already had some proof points. I was new in the job so I was like all listening to, you know, what the team were telling me. We have a great opportunity here and took that formered as a new concept for the company. We got funding approval and you know the rest is the history and the journey that we're on. So I think it was just taking a different perspective and a different approach and working with a team who already had the, built some of that credibility and others proof points with the earlier deployments and I think we kind of took a risk at the time when we started the engagement with Magento. They weren't in that leadership quadrant and we took a risk to say, let's partner with an energizing company and do something a little bit different and we're still here working towards it so I think that for me was the breakthrough, was just having the tenacity to say, we're gonna drive this path forward. It may not be how we would have done things in the past, but we're a different company now. and we had much more thinner air cover to be able to do that. >> Little bit more agility and flexibility. >> Yeah, absolutely. So you guys, you talked about, Gillian about all the buyers. We are the consumers and we have this expectation, growing expectation that I want to be able to get any and transact anything that I want to buy, whether I'm a procuring person for a company and I'm traveling but I need to approve expenses or I'm a salesperson maybe sitting next to a medium-small business customer. I need to have the option at least to have this store front. What are the things that you guys launched in Apache, leverage be the power of Magento Commerce was click to collect. So tell me a little bit about from maybe an e-commerce cultural perspective, what is it that makes people want to have the ability to start online and actually complete the transaction in a physical location? >> Essentially I was in the Advisory Board yesterday and one of the other customers of Magento said, "Until we can invent a way to touch and feel online, "there's always gonna be a need to have, "outlets where you can go touch and feel." and I think with the click and collect, some of our products are, you know, high-end PCs and gaming devices and printers that is hard to get a good appreciation of what it looks and feels like online. So if you're gonna be spending you know, a significant money you may want to go in and be able to see the colors, feel the finish. You know some of our newer products with the leather portfolios is not something you can truly appreciate without touching it. So I think we have to enable again those customers who do want to experience, feel the weight, you know feel the finish, see the color scheme 'cause its usually important, again not for all customers. Some customers are quite happy to spend thousands of dollars on an online purchase without seeing it and then making sure they have a good facility to be able to, well if they wanted to, to return if they got the normal the product. >> As we look though at like we talked about, this consumerization of everything where we have this expectation and the numbers, I think you even mentioned it maybe in your keynote, Gillian, the numbers of, or somebody did this morning, like upwards of half of all transactions are starting on mobile so we got to start there. What are some of the things that you guys have seen in region in terms of mobile conversions? >> So there's still a massive gap between desktop and mobile conversions, first of all. I mean we're not anywhere near parity between the two. But obviously we're seeing a huge volume of traffic coming in as well and it's shifting that way, so you would expect it to drop as result. I think with Magento what we've seen over the, you know, past few deployments that we've been running and that were over 8% improven. But the desktop conversions are far higher. I mean in terms of improvement and actual conversion so we've still got a long way to go. There and that's a naturative process, that's a journey that probably never ends in terms of ongoing optimization and experimentation. So yeah a lot happening there. I think just on the click and collect topic as well that you were asking about people wanting to start their journey online and then come into bricks and mortar. We're seeing a huge uptake on it just by experimenting, by piloting. Over 26% of our consumer notebooks in India that we've put onto this program were being collected in store and this is in environments which are inherently chaotic on the streets. You don't want to go out there but actually I'm passing that way anyway so it's just easier for me to pick it up on the way home and probably quicker 'cause I can collect in two hours. So it's just giving people customer choice, no additional incentive and it seems to take. So now we're expanding out regionally. >> So you said there's, this morning, Gillian, in your keynote eight markets covered, mostly Apache, but also in Latin America. >> We just started in Latin America, again, the development process is not just as simple as we're switching on. So we've been doing a lot of work for this past six months with Latin America. The team there, they're super excited to get launched. There's some differences there, we've talked about the regional variation around fulfillment models that we have to adapt towards but the intent is to get Latin America deployed, leveraging some of the layer lengths from what we've done in Asia specific and then starting to move around into more the near region and then ultimately back into the US and Canada. >> So as you look forward and of course you've mentioned we're on this journey right, what are some of the key learnings that you're going to apply? You mentioned this morning, something that was very intriguing and that was, respect the integrity of the Magento platform. Talk about that in context of some of the other learnings that you'd recommend for colleagues and similar or other industries to be able to achieve what you have on a global scale. >> I think from the outset, there was this kind of like baggage of deployments of capabilities not just in commerce but deployment of capabilities across HP that we had not respected the integrity of the platform. We had adjusted the code and developed on the code to make it HP specific and with the new HP Inc. company one of the guided principles was no, when we buy the leverage software applications respect it for what it is and adjust business processes and adjust integration rather than adjust the core so that we can get the advantage of the longer term opportunity without creating such like. So it was really just a foundational, you know, let's not go in here with a mindset that we know better than the core. The core is there for a reason and then build around that and ensure the integration and I think you know with Herriot's leadership, we've been able to you know, just keep that firm is why we can be successful and be successful longer term as well. So that all the, and one of the things we talked about yesterday also is the excellent capabilities that are coming with Adobe and the integration that we talked about the recommendation of Adobe Sensei and integrate that with Magento Core. If you don't keep to the respect the integrity, those upgrades and capabilities become really hard to take benefit of so we're really excited about, you know, again, sticking with the core and enabling and growing with the core with Magento and Adobe. >> I would just build on it, I mean I think its never gonna be easy running a global commerce platform. Single instance, multiple countries, you know, 27 markets to get started with. Who knows where we're gonna end. Its always gonna be a challenge so we have to keep it as simple as possible. These upgrades are fast and furious and that's great and we all gets lots of benefit but if we start going down our own path, we've lost it. We've lost the benefit. >> And that's one of the things too that Jason Wolfsteen said this morning was that the word Magento was gonna be enabling businesses to achieve without getting in their way and it kind of sounds Herriot, like you're saying the same thing. That we've gotta be able to respect the technologies that we're building so we don't get in our own way and we keep it simple as we wanna expand globally. Ultimately at the end of the day, you're creating these personalized experiences with consumers and that personalization is so important because it's more and more not only are we transacting or wanting to on mobile but we want our brands like HP to know us. We want you to know our brand value, you know our average order value so that we can become part of the experience but also ideally get rewarded for being loyal. >> Yeah. >> Yeah, I mean, I mean just coming to mobile again but you know, 2.3 delivers the native PWA capabilities which we're super excited to get started with. You know we've got so many used cases for this straight away, right out the box but you know we've got to do it gradually, do it the right way. I think we're also aware that we're not gonna be able to run with PWA in all markets straight away 'cause not all markets are ready for it quite frankly. User behavior- >> Is that a cultural thing? >> It's purely cultural. Maybe technical and just technical ecosystems as well. Places like China in particular, where, you know, customers use app stores but they use app stores from every single phone manufacturer right there. That's where the customer is. We can't just move away from that so we need to keep some of those legacy approaches for a little while and then yeah test in other regions and then take the learnings when we're ready to adopt it. >> Exciting so here we are at, this is the first Magento Imagine since the Adobe acquisition. Gillian, let's wrap things up with you. What are your, you mentioned you were part of the Customer Advisory Board yesterday, just some of your perspectives on this years' event now that Magento is powering the Adobe commerce cloud. >> I actually attended the Adobe Summit a few weeks ago here also in Vegas and started to see the thread of commerce coming into that conference and then seeing the Adobe, the experience, coming into Magento and I just think it's a perfect combination of opportunities especially for a company like HP where we were linked in to connect, you know, marketing and sales and support across the customer journey and the capabilities with Adobe and some of the marketing stack, and then the commerce stack, and there was support bringing that together is a super exciting opportunity for us. You know the partnership that we have with both Adobe and Magento again as one as I really, they were just starting what the next journey was gonna look like. >> We feel that about so many things, we're just starting, but Gillian, Herriot, it's been a pleasure to have you on theCUBE for Magento Imagine 2019. Thank you both for your time. >> Thank you, thank you. >> Our pleasure. I'm Lisa Martin and you're watching theCUBE live from The Wynn Las Vegas at Magento Imagine 2019. Thanks for watching. (light music)