>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Magento Imagine 2019. (fizzing) (upbeat music) Brought to you by Adobe. >> Hi, welcome back to theCUBE. Lisa Martin with Jeff Frick at Imagine 2019, the Wynn, Las Vegas, with about 3500 customers, lots of partners, lots of developers, a lot of energy here. And speaking of energy, we have Jason Woosley, VP of commerce at Adobe. Jason, you came onto the stage this morning from the clouds suspended. Talk about energy. >> It was a lot of energy, and there was a message behind it, right? (clears throat) I mean we really are talking about our Cloud penetration and how that is the future. So, you know, I got to do something really cool and check something off the bucket list where I actually did descend from the sky onto the stage. It was the best Imagine entrance I've ever done (Lisa laughing) and really does talk about, you know, how important our Cloud Strategy is. Thanks for having me on, by the way. >> Absolutely. >> Our pleasure. >> So, a lot of energy here, again, community, community, community. We go to so many shows, so many people are desperate to engage developers. And you guys have that in your core. It's been there from day one. Continues to be such an important part of who you are as well as the road forward. >> It's the reason for why we are where we are today. I mean bar none, right? Our community, this eco system. And it's not something you can buy. It's not something you can even intentionally build. You have to nurture, you have to create a platform that speaks to a large audience, and then you've just got to make sure that you're treating those developers and your partners really, really well, empowering them to really differentiate that experience at the last mile. And, you know, it's a flywheel effect. You end up with this incredible community that's anxious to contribute back into our code base and they have made, what you see at this conference is a result of that community. It's not anything that Magento could do. It's not anything that Adobe could do. It is just something that has to organically happen, and then you have to nurture the heck out of it. And that, that's really what we've done. >> And this is a community that you say has grown organically to several hundred thousand people who I feel like to say that they're influential to Magento, the technologies is actually an understatement with how much, how, again, I think influential's the wrong word. They're stronger than that. >> They're absolutely core to it, right? I mean they're an extension of our development methodology. You know, I like to think about, you know, I run engineering as part of my organization, and everybody in my group is customer-facing. Just like everybody in out community is customer-facing. And so we've tried to tear down the walls that separate our community members from our internal core engineers, because it creates this incredible diversity of perspective that you can't find anywhere else. I mean, no matter how much I invest in broadly diverse engineering teams across the globe, 300,000 engineers, they call themselves Magento developers, don't take a paycheck from Adobe but contribute back to our code base, influence our road map and really show us the way. It's an incredible phenomenon. >> In the last year since the announcement of the Adobe acquisition and the actual completion of that six, seven months ago, how has that community reacted, strengthened? What have been some of your surprising observations about the community's strength? >> It is surprising, and I'll tell you why. I think we came into the acquisition with a lot of apprehension, right. There was a concern that, you know, Adobe's too big. They're too corporate. They don't really love Open Source. All untrue, right? Adobe has incredible Open Source initiatives already inside, but you don't here a lot about it. And so, our community, I think, is it's a little bit concerned about, you know, does the level of investment go down? Does all of our ability to promote that product, does that, do we start to back off of that? And of course, we have not done that at all, and in fact, what we've seen is that our community loves the Adobe acquisition. They see opportunity just as clearly as we do. We have more than triple-digit growth in the number of community contributions coming in to us since the acquisition last year. It is a clear sign that the ecosystem is fully on board with where we're going. >> Right. Well clearly the Adobe Suite provides so much gunpowder to power the commerce that's been at the core of Magento from the beginning. I mean it almost begs the question, why didn't this happen a long, long time ago? >> I think there's something to be said about that, and, but you know what, it took Adobe a while. They picked the right platform. We're very confident of that, and, you know, their investment in community is actually paying off on the Adobe side, right. When you think about digital experience products, they (Adobe) are now more active than ever in open source projects. We've got, you know, folks from Adobe Experience Manager that are writing code and contributing to Magento, which is, it's absolutely terrific. And they're now talking about how do we get the ability to kind of create that contribution mechanism and at least create a platform concept where, you know, everybody plays. It's an equal playing field. You can serve us small, you can serve us large. And it just brings everybody together to solve these common, complex problems that are joint merchant's face. >> I don't know how many times you've been on stage in the last few days but, a couple. But one of the things you really, you know, (pounding) you didn't pound on the table but you basically pounded on the table, is that we are still, totally, 100% behind SMB. >> Jason: Absolutely. >> It's our core. We're not giving that up. >> We built this market together, right. This was what made Magento what it is. It's where we play the best. We know it better than anybody else in the industry, and we're not retreating. We're doubling down. We've got ground to take in the mid-market, and I can't wait to do it. >> Right, but what's wild is you're enabling the mid-market, to compete with the tools of the big guys. So, announcements are on the integration with Amazon, announcements are on integration with Google. So it's kind of an interesting place for small retailers, small merchants. They've got to compete in this world, so you're really giving 'em an aid, an opportunity to both play in what might be a big competitor as well as leverage that ecosystem and assets as well as doing it within their own brick and mortar or their own site . >> And that's a terrific point. I think one of the reasons we do that is we've seen consumer expectations rising through the roof, right. I mean, everything from, you know, fast shipping is now one-day. And it wasn't very long ago that fast shipping, if you could get it within a week, that was pretty darn quick. >> Jeff: Right. >> But now fast shipping is one day, and that's across the board. Consumers are expecting frictionless payment. They're expecting, you know, buy online, pick up in-store, omni-channel capabilities. Really all of these capabilities. And a consumer, a shopper, really doesn't care whether you're big or small. What they care about is the experience that the consume when they interact with your brand. And so, bringing the tools of the enterprise to the mid-market allows them to compete on a more level playing field, and that's really where you generate all those great innovation. And that's where you see, you know, these smaller merchants that are really able to, you know, drive into something that, you know, may not have been a core target for some of the larger enterprises, but they find an niche and are able to deliver, but they have the same personalization needs. They have the same logistics needs. All of that has not changed just because they're a smaller organization. And so it's really on us to be able to provide them the tooling and the access to the capabilities that let them compete with the larger merchants. >> No, 'cause you're right. As consumers, which we are every day, we don't care if they're a big or small company, or what technologies that, well, no we do care, to a degree, that we can start something from a mobile phone, have a great seamless experience >> Jason: Yep. >> that's not gonna cause me to churn, because I'm not going to be able to find what I want. I want it to be personalized. I want them to know enough about me in a non-creepy way, as you say. >> That's right. If it's good, it's magic. (Lisa laughing) If it's bad, it's creepy! >> Right, regardless of-- >> That's fair. >> That's for recommendation engines. >> Yeah, no, that's fair. >> And expect that they have what I want. But also what you're doing now is giving these SMBs, these smaller organizations, the ability to harness this sort of symbiotic data power between Adobe and Magento for advertising, analytics, marketing, commerce, to be able to have that wealth of knowledge to make that experience exactly what that consumer expects. >> Exactly right. I mean it's about bringing behavioral data and the transactional data together to really get a 360 degree view of individual customers. And guess what? There's too much raw data there for Excel to ever be able to tell you anything. You've got to rely on things like artificial intelligence and machine learning so that things like Adobe Sensei to really derive insight out of that mass set of data. But that's the way you create those personalized experiences. You have to employ those techniques to get there. >> Right, I just wanted to unpack the Sensei down-spin a little bit, 'cause I think that's really interesting. You know, AI's been a great buzzword. We see it in a lot of places. You know, our Google email now automatically figures out what we want to reply to our email. But it's the integration of AI in applications is where we're really starting to see it come to market early, and this is a great example of, you know, using the Adobe AI inside of Sensei, on specific parts of the application to deliver a better application, a better consumer experience. >> And we've got a great roadmap for rolling out Artificial Intelligence capabilities to Magento commerce. It's one of the largest value adds that we'll do over the next 12 months, is really bringing those capabilities around recommendations, around experience personalization and experience targeting. Around A/B testing. And then you think a little bit into the future, and suddenly you're looking at an AI that can give you pricing recommendations and campaign recommendations, and, you know, that is a, that's a world we cannot wait to really explore fully in the commerce world, because I think that those are the tools, you know Amazon applies a lot of dynamic pricing techniques right now. It's a really expensive process. I don't know a lot of small merchants that have access to the tools to do that. We're bringing those tools to small merchants, and that's gonna change the game fundamentally, I believe. >> And a way that they can do it, almost themselves, rather than having to have a team of resources, which a small business doesn't have. >> And that is the name of the game for small business. You can't require them to have a data science team. You can't require them to have an IT staff or a Web development team. You gotta give them everything they need so that they can focus on retail, what they know best, merchandising to their customers and, you know, managing their inventory, driving up the correct margins and then making sure that they're able to grow the lifetime value of their customers, right? That's the Holy Grail for retail is when you can actually optimize against lifetime value. Because it's the number one thing that all merchants are chasing. >> Yeah, 'cause you had the guy on the keynote yesterday. I'm not in the demographic. I'm trying to remember the name of the-- >> Oh, Troy, Troy Brown from Zumiez! >> From Zumiez, yeah. >> Yeah. >> I thought it was just really interesting, you know, kind of re-thinking retail, right? Retail is not dead, but it's different, and you have to be different. And really to see how they have kind of taken their concept I thought it was pretty interesting, especially around the fact that he has no more fulfillment centers, he said. But basically, they're fulfilling from the store. They want to engage you in the store. It's a convenient thing. Especially now we see Amazon packages are all gettin' stolen off of doorsteps. But, you know, enabling them to be creative around their customer engagement, not necessarily worry about how to run a bunch of A/B tests. They let you do that complicated stuff. >> Let us take on all of the complexity, and then they can actually benefit from the insights derived from that. And what Zumiez have done, it's a phenomenal story, right. I mean, you're going away from this centralized warehouse concept, to really turning all of their stores into distribution centers, right? 704 or so, brick and mortar-strong where, you know, they now have merchandise close to their consumers. They have, you know, the ability to do showcasing, buy online, pick-up in store, all of the omni-channel techniques that are grabbing so much traction right now. And Zumiez has really capitalized. >> Jeff: Right. >> They've done a terrific job, and it's great seeing it come from these really innovative retailers, right? I mean, that show last night with Zumiez was absolutely, you know, fantastic. Their culture is super unique, highly energetic, but they're driving technology forward in a way that you might not expect from a skateboard apparel shop. >> Right, well, they're making Champion cool again. It came out of the Champion, and it was in the demo. I'm like, I didn't know Champion was a cool brand. >> Apparently, it is cool now. >> Jeff: It's cool now. >> You and I are both out of that demographic, (Jeff laughing) but it is a very good story. >> One of the things that we're hearing and seeing is that we talked about personalization and that this expectation, that as consumers, we bring to everything we buy, whatever it happens to be, but also, this sort of, looking at Amazon as an example, of going to brick and mortar from purely online, the acquisition of Whole Foods, people still wanting to have that human interaction. We talk about it all the time when we talk about AI, is that pretty much the common thread is yes, AI, and maybe yes, online to a degree, and then there's still that need and that demand for that personal face-to-face or maybe voice-to-voice interaction. >> Yeah, well, you know, its really for me, it's about taking that brand, you know, experience and making sure that it's resonating across all of your digital properties as well as all of the physical properties, right. It is about really leveraging. My brand experience is consistent across every place that I come encounter my customers, and I'm ready to transact anytime my customers are ready to transact. And when, you know, talking about Amazon. we've announced some really cool stuff this Ad Imagine on Amazon, a partnership. where Amazon sellers can now have a branded storefront on Magento. This is allowing folks that have done a terrific job selling in the market place, where you don't have a lot of opportunity for experience differentiation on the amazon.com site. >> Lisa: Right. >> And it's a terrific marketplace. More than 50% of product searches are starting on Amazon now. So it's a reality that retailers need to find a way to come to grips with. >> Jeff: Right. >> And what I'm really excited about is that those merchants that are doing really well on Amazon now have a new channel where they can create these branded experiences and really start differentiating themselves from their competitors. It's going to be a terrific story. It's Branded Storefronts for Amazon Sellers is the name of the offering. And its going to change the game for folks that have been exclusively Amazon, maybe thinking its too hard to go get an online presence that actually represents my brand. Now its a piece of cake. They've got a clean path to get there, and the capabilities go both ways, right? We also announced Amazon sales channel for Magento commerce that allows you as a branded merchant, to go and participate on the Amazon Marketplace and have full control over your inventory, your orders and all of your catalog. >> It's so funny, you know, we talk about experience but so much of retail execution is actually inventory execution, right? >> [Jason} That's Right. >> It's inventory management. That's where all your money sits. You can get it real upside down really quickly if you're not managing your inventory. And if you don't have the right amount of inventory, especially as you say with same-day delivery now being an expected behavior. And so to add the sophisticated tools on the back and to manage that inventory across that broad, kind of distribution plane, if you will, with all these different points of engagement is so critical to these guys to have any type of chance of success. >> Yeah, it is. It's absolutely critical, and we've also got a Magento order management product that specializes in sort of global inventory control. We've made terrific investments there to bring new capabilities to make sure that those omni-channel aspirations are not something that a merchant has to go invest a whole lot of money and change in their systems. I think it is interesting to think about when you talk about how B2C is really bleeding into B2B, right. As supply chain management, you know, 70% of our B2C merchants, self-described, actually engaged in B2B workflows, and almost all of our B2B-only merchants are really looking at how do I go B2B to C? >> Jess: Right. >> So there's this really great platform play happening, and the fact that Magento commerce and Adobe commerce Cloud can serve us B2B and B2C and all the hybrids in-between really puts us in a differentiated position and helps merchants not have to go invest in multiple platform, multiple maintainability and then find some way to reconcile the inventory between the two. >> Right, and we had a quote earlier today. I can't remember who said it, but I thought it was great where, you know, no longer is the actual transaction the destination. Right, but now you're bringing the transaction to, you know, kind of the journey. It's a very different way to think about a traditional funnel. It isn't the traditional funnel that you work your way down to the end. Now you're inserting commerce opportunities, >> Jason: Yep. >> engagement opportunities all along kind of this content flow. >> We kind of teased ourselves, right, We kinda lied to ourselves and said that, you know, this is a linear journey. And we've all bought into it, right. You know all the steps, right. It's a discovery, awareness, I mean all the way to post-purchase. Its not linear. People move in and out of each of those sections, and so being able to transact where the customer is ready to transact is critically important >> Jeff: Right. >> and then understanding that the post-sale service is the key to lifetime value. That's the other major learning that we're trying to take away from this. And it's why it's important to be at every point your customer is. >> Yeah, it's interesting, 'cause especially with these things, because you don't sit down to work on your phone like we sat down to work at these things. >> Jason: That's right. >> And so your attention, >> Jason: works coming to you. >> it's coming to you, and its coming in little bits. Oh, and by the way, there's a whole bunch of notifications coming on that can pull you away. >> Jason: Yeah. >> So they're very different challenges in terms of actual engagement when this is the primary vehicle. >> And increasingly, it is the primary vehicle, right? >> Jess: Absolutely. >> More than 50% of traffic to retail, e-commerce site is generated from a mobile phone, and there are emerging markets where that is the only internet-connected device, and so it's the standard. You absolutely have to take mobile very seriously. There's a great set of technologies coming online to help us get there. It's called Progressive Web Application. It's going to change the game on how mobile is treated as a device, and in fact, it gets rid of the need for discrete native applications. So instead of having an IOS app, an Android app, a desktop storefront, a mobile storefront and maybe a tablet storefront, plus your online brick and mortar, now you can actually say, my digital properties are serviced by one set of technology. And that way, when I make a change to one, it shows up in everything. I don't have all these difference code bases to maintain. It's a total cost of ownership, and really, a time-to-market play >> Lisa: I was gonna say, >> across the board. >> faster time-to market for sure. >> Absolutely. Yeah. >> With far less resources. >> Well, and bringing it so that you really have to invest in allowing your merchandisers to merchandise on your digital properties, right? If there is an engineer sitting between your merchandiser and the customer, that time lag and even just trying to get it done, there's so much frustration there. So creating these self-service tools that really allow non-technical merchandisers to go in, make adjustments to how they're selling products across all those channels very, very easily and in one place, that's gonna return a ton of value to our merchants. So its another thing that we're super excited about. >> No, you deliver that consistent experience that the consumer is expecting, and then, we were talking to PayPal earlier, start to help companies close that revenue gap of getting them from mobile to, you know, wanting to transact and making that whole process seamless. >> There's a nine billion dollar opportunity in closing the mobile gap. When you think about abandoned cards and folks that begin the checkout process for whatever reason, likely they get frustrated and don't want to type in their credit card number or don't want to type in their address, and then they move to another device or another store that's doing checkout in a more frictionless way, the nine billion dollar opportunity if you close that. >> Wow, that's huge! >> So its incredibly important. >> It is incredibly important. Well Jason, we wish we had more time, but we thank you so much for stopping by theCUBE and talking with Jeff and Me. Such an exciting time. Sounds like developers are feeling embraced. The community is happy. Customers are reacting well. So we can't wait to hear whats next, next year. >> This is the best place to be in the world in commerce. Thank you guys so much for having me on. It's always a pleasure, and I've enjoyed it a lot. >> Oh, our pleasure as well, Jason. >> Alright, thank you, guys. Thanks, Jason. >> For Jeff Frick, I'm Lisa Martin at Imagine 2019 at the Wynn, Las Vegas. Thanks for watching. (upbeat techno music)

>> 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)

>> live from Las Vegas it's the cube, covering Magento Imagine 2019. Brought to you by Adobe. >> Hey welcome back to the cube, Lisa Martin with Jeff Frick live at The Wynn Las Vegas for Magento Imagine 2019, with about 3500 people here give or take a few. We're very pleased to welcome Magento evangelist Ben Marks to the Cube, Ben welcome >> Thank you for having me, I appreciate you making time. >> And thanks for bringing the flair to our set. >> I've got to let people know where my allegiances lie, right? >> So this is the first Magento Imagine post adobe acquisition, that was announced about a year ago completed about six or seven months ago. You have a very strong history with Magento the last 10 years, Magento is very much known for their developer community, their open source history and DNA. Talk to us about, how things are now with the community and really the influence that the developers have. >> Well if it's up to me we retain this really strong influence in the business. I mean at the the core of Magento since its inception the very humble beginnings that it had back in back in 2007 has been this this developer ecosystem. And that is what takes the software basically all the output and all of the expertise and intuition that we have that we put into our products and our services, it only goes so far. Now it is a platform that tends to fit in a lot of places but it only goes so far and we have that last mile, that is the most important distance that we cross and we cannot do it without this ecosystem. They are the ones that they know, they understand the merchant requirements, they understand the vertical, they understand the region, they understand cross border concerns, whatever it may be they know our product from an expert perspective and then they take that and they make it make sense. That being the case, Adobe I think so far has shown excellent stewardship in terms of recognizing the value. A big part of that 1.7 billion price tag, they paid for the community. They knew this ecosystem was the real, has always been the x-factor in Magento and so they've been very diligent, well now that I'm an employee we've been very introspective about what that means as part of adobe, is part of this this massive set of opportunities and new addressable market that we have. And we're just all trying to make sure that we look after all of these people who are at the end of the day probably our biggest champions. >> Just curious how you've been able to maintain that culture because to be kind of open source and open source first timer, first isn't the right word but open source neutral or pro, along with your proprietary stuff and to really engage developers it's such a special town and as a special culture because by rule you're saying that there's more smart people outside of our walls than inside of our walls and embracing and loving that. But you guys have gone through all kinds of interesting kind of evolutions on the business side in terms of ownership and management. How've you been able to maintain that? And what is kind of the secret sauce? Why are the developers so passionate to continue to develop a Magento? Because let me tell you we go to a lot of conferences and a lot of people are trying really hard to get that developer to spend that next time working on their platform versus a different one. >> Yeah, well you know it's endemic to our culture that whether it's a developer, someone who's working who's an expert in administering Magento stores, just whatever someone's focus is in this ecosystem, it is interesting we've always had at the underpinning everything has been this open source ethos. So from the very beginnings of Magento, the creators Roy Rubin and Yoav Kutner, they sought out as they announced this Magento thing back in the day. They intentionally made it open-source because they knew that, that had been proved by a previous open-source commerce software and they knew that that was really where they were going to win that was the force multiplier. Again the thing that would get them into markets that they couldn't address with their very small agency that they were walking out of. So through the years that grew and in large part we can thank the Doc community, especially in Germany, the Dutch community, there's just the general open source ethos there. But I learned about open source from Magento, I had someone help me out when I was first starting at my first week working with Magento as a developer there was no documentation, I had to go into a chatroom and ask for help and this guy he actually spent about a couple of hours helping me and we remain close friends to this day. But at the end of it I'm like so should I pay you? And he was this guy this guy from outside of Heidelberg he's just no this is open source, is like just as you learn give it back. And that's a perfect summation for a big part of the spirit here. It helps who are in commerce, there's money kind of flowing all around but at the end of the day we provide options, we provide flexibility where there's nothing wrong with the sass platforms there's nothing wrong with some of the the larger like API driven platforms, it's just at some point if you have a custom requirement that they can't satisfy and that happens regularly, guess what? You got to go with the platform that gives you the extensibility. So they feel a sense of ownership I think because of that and they're sort of proud to take this wherever they can. >> So with the Adobe acquisition being complete around six eight months you mentioned Adobe doing a good job of welcoming this community but you also talked about this core ethos that Magento brings. I believe in the press release, announcing the acquisition last year, Adobe said open source is in our DNA. Have you found that one to be true? And two how much has the Magento open source community been able to sort of open the eyes and maybe open the door to Adobe's ethos of embracing it? >> Let's see how much trouble can I get in to today? >> So I have a good counterpart over Alberto Dobby and it's a stretch for me to call him a counterpart. He's got his JD,he's been big in the open source world for since forever but, Matt Asay probably... >> CUBE alum >> ...if you follow tech online, you've seen this post, you've seen him as an postulating on open source and it was interesting a lot of us were asking the same question from Magento world because a lot of us remembere the eBay days and an eBay had a sort of a different plan and vision for Magento that ultimately, that whole thing they were trying to create just didn't work out. Magento survived, but we're a bit wary we all knew it was coming it's the natural progression from private equity ownership but really, where is this open source that we were told about? And Matt is a kind of a big a piece there but as it turns out he jumped on Twitter immediately when none of us was supposed to be talking about anything of course but that's in Matt's nature. Because there is a lot of open source at Adobe in fact there's a lot of open source technology that underpins even these Enterprise Solutions that they offer. I visited with with several of our team members in the Basel office and there are Apache Software Foundation board members. I mean you want to to talk about the beginnings of open source and the impact its had on the world? These are some of these people and so yes it's there I think it's not a secret to say that Adobe really hasn't done a great job of telling that story. So as I've met and kind of toured around with some of the Adobe vice presidents who've been visiting here and I love that they're engaged. They get this, they want this to expand. It's been it's been really interesting watching them and encounter this and then start to be inspired by us as much as we are inspired by again the opportunities that exist as we all come together. >> It's great, yeah and Matt's been on his Trevi a week cover, CNCF and will be a cube con I think next week and in Barcelona so we're huge advocates, but so it's such a different way of looking at the world again accepting that there's more smart people outside your four walls than are inside your four walls. Which just by rule is the way that it has to be, you can't hire all the smart people. So to use that leverage and really build this develop wrapped advocacy is a really tremendous asset. >> Better together, is what we say, and it could not be true. I mean there there is no way we could know at all, we can't hope to. So what we've done actually in the last couple of years really under some brilliant leadership by Jason Woosley we've been able to double down on our open-source investment and I'd say that was a moment when we truly became an open-source company with through and through because we spun up and we took our best architects and just put them on a project called community engineering that they're dedicated to enabling contribution of fixes improvements and features from our ecosystem. So by doing that we all of a sudden we now have worldwide engineering that is that they're all experts in their individual domains so that line of code that some contributor from somewhere is contributing, he or she has become an expert let's say in something as glamorous like totals calculation like the logic that has to go into that. Because of their real-world experience we get the highest quality code that's just backed up by a lot of trial and tribulation. And from that we basically get to cover all of our bases and they tend to write things in a way that's way more extensible than probably we could ever envision. I don't know of a better formula for having a product that satisfies something so varied and challenging and just constantly evolving as e-commerce. >> Well and I think Jason mentioned this morning that the community engineering program was only launched a couple of years ago. >> Literally a two years ago February. >> So significant impacts in a very short period of time. >> Yeah we were fascinated to see that while we'd had this kind of haphazard almost ad hoc open source engagement up to that point, once we really built machinery around it We've we've managed to build something that is a model for any other company that wants to try to do this. Once we did that we very quickly got to some of our big releases where over 50% of the new lines of code were written externally. And that was cool for about a week and then we realized that that's not even the story the story is everything else I talked about which is just that degree of ownership that degree of informed engineering that we would never come up with on our own. And it was a real signal to this very patient and resilient ecosystem that hey, we're all in this together. And of course we've done that also, we've replicated that with our developer documentation, it's all open source and able to be contributed to and we sort of look at how that can expand and even to the point where our core architecture team now all of their discussions so you can go to github.com/magento, you can see our backlog, you could see where we're discussing features and kind of planning what's coming next. You can also go to our architecture repository and you see all of our core architects having their dialogue with each other in public so that the public is informed and they can be involved and that is literally the highest stage I believe of open source evolution. >> That's a great story now the other great thing though that it don't be brought to you is some really sophisticated marketing tools to drive the commerce in your engine, so I'm just curious your perspective. You've been playing in this for a long time but you guys are really kind of taken over at the transactional level now to have that front-end engagement tools, partners, methodologies, I mean you got to be excited. >> Well really so going back to my, I remember my agency days I remember why some of the Google Analytics code looks the way it does because I remember the product that it was before. Urgent analytics right and I remember when we could first do split tests and one of the first cool projects I ever worked on in Magento 1.1 was sort of parsing Google's cookies to be able to sort of change the interface of Magento and test that for conversion rights. And to think of how far we've come, now we have the power and the mandate really to absolutely know everything about the customer experience, the customer journey and then I'm sitting there in our keynotes you know in the general session yesterday, looking up and I'm looking at the slide and I'm seeing like 14 trillion transactions that are captured in our various apparatus and I think that it's tremendous responsibility, it's tremendous power. And if we if we combine, if we use this insight responsibly, what we do is we continue to do what I think Magento has done all along which has allowed us to be at not just at the forefront of where commerce evolves but really to set the standard that consumers begin to expect. And I know we've all felt it, when you have when you have that experience and it feels very full of friction I know we can do better and I will immediately go away from any website that makes it hard for me to do what I want to do any website that seems like they are kind of a partner on my journey that's where I mean that's we're going to spend my time and my money and that's really what we're trying to really lean into here. >> Which is essential, because as you mentioned if I'm doing something on my phone I expect a really fast transaction and there's friction points, I'm gone. I will be able to find another service or product that meets my need because there is so much choice and there's so much competition for almost every product and service. So being able to leverage the power of advertising, analytics, marketing and commerce to really deliver the fundamentals of the business needs to truly manage the customer experience is a game changer. >> Yap it is so what we're what we're looking to these days you know Magento, just before the acquisition was announced made a tremendous investment to start up it's completely independent trade association called the Magento Association. It's a place for our community to collect under. And and when we're here and Magento is still a big champion of ours a big source of investment and we are you know we are looking and I kind of wear both hats right because I'm a board member of that group as well as being a Magento Adobe employee. But one of the focus that we have is still that collaborative spirit where we start to carry the message and the capabilities of this tooling so that we can ensure that this ecosystem remains and powered to deliver the experiences that our customers and their customers expect. >> Absolutely, well Ben thank you so much for sharing your knowledge and your enthusiasm and passion >> Yeah did that come through I was hoping. >> You could next time dial it up a little bit more. >> Okay good. >> Awesome and bring more flair. >> I'll bring more flair next time. [Lisa Mumbling] >> I'm still wondering what happened to the capes? >> The magician master capes yes. >> I can I can probably go grab you a couple. >> That would be awesome orange is my favorite color. >> Good to know. >> Ben it's been a pleasure having you on the program we look forward to next year. >> Likewise thank you both. >> Our pleasure. For Jeff Rick, I'm Lisa Martin and you are watching theCube live at Magento imagine 2019 from Vegas. Thanks for watching. (upbeatmusic)