>> Live from Las Vegas. It's the queue covering Adobe Summit twenty nineteen brought to you by Adobe. >> Everyone. Welcome back to the cubes. Live coverage. Adobe summat twenty nineteen here for two days. I'm John for a jefe. Rick. Our next guest is Mark Lenhard. SVP of Growth. Part of the big news is the adobe commerce cloud mark for me with magenta Now Adobe, Great to see you. Thanks for coming on. Thanks for having me. It's real pleasure to be here. So very impressive. Adobe with there the creative products at their end user applications Really great stuff. People know it. It's a cloud service. The transformations happened. But what's really happening to is this platform continues to get billed. You guys with Magenta, one of the big pieces of the puzzle Marquette O's got. They got a big piece over there. You guys are a big part of commerce Cloud big news here. What's the Commerce cloud about? You guys announced the hear of the show. When is going to be available? What's the features? What's the dude? So give us the overview. No, >> great And again, Thanks for having me. It's really been It's been a wild year with the Magenta acquisition coming in really folding into a suite of products on the experience side that really are designed to really help companies transform themselves right and really own the entire customer experience all the way from Discovery through to Buy to through Renew. >As we saw this morning.  And Commerce really fits in there nicely in the Buy section and what was announced today is with Adobe Commerce. Cloud is the opportunity which available now for for our larger merchants and enterprises to get the core magenta platform, which are our customers know in love. But get that in a way that's managed by adobe eyes more fully integrated into the other products and services. So you can deliver that full customer on tow n journey on which hand features which will will happen over time, particularly as we get two more data driven data driven insights and over time sense A and air power tools. >> You know, I love looking at slides because you can tell a lot by a slide right when the lame out these chinos kind of architecture slides. But I think it's interesting about the adobe experience. Cloud is, it lays out nicely because you have cloud modules. If you will are building blocks, you got the add cloud, the analytics cloud, the market cloud and the commerce cloud. Then you got platform underneath, enabling. That's a lot of nice decouple but cohesive elements to it. Which really is a testament to that kind of how they're laying out that experience, cloud and experience. What is the commerce clouds roll in that? Because you guys have to be highly cohesive to do the kind of levels of commerce that's demanded and B to B. Now it's changing them. We'LL direct a consumer business model, so it's a consumer like marketing function in a B t B context. How is that changing? What magenta wass and what's it turning into as commerce cloud specifically? Well, >> you know, a lot of it is just really leveraging a lot of the features of functionality that Magenta had really just fit in really, really nicely into that, that user journey, right? And so where magenta is really slotting in nicely is in that by section, right? If you've got discovery by to renew by all the way to through her new magenta and the corps platform, there really helps deliver that so that our customs, whether there be to be or or B to C or they're trying to go direct to consumer. They're able to develop that content, that rich content market to those customers, drive them Teo to magenta, enable them to transact and then actually renew induced. You know, everything from diddle products to consumers for two physical goods. >> It's interesting you look at the slides to it. It feels like an operating environment, right? Because you have cloud you guys air on cloud. There's a lot of touch points with other pieces of the system means an operating system basically almost not technically, but a platform. You could put the platform, you're gonna talk the things so data I could imagine is critical. If you want to do that journey and you're a big part of the by piece, you've got to talk to others. Other pieces of the platform. How important is the data architecture? Can you explain how you guys look at that? Because now you come into the adobe >> fold, >> their data centric data super important. We heard that in the keynote. What's the role of data and all this, and how do you see >> that? So it's it's absolutely critical. Azi mentioned on being able to harmonize that across the platform and be able to have all of those pieces talk to each other so that you can get everything from behavioral data front. I know what you're doing on a website. I know what you're doing on instagram other platforms two I know whatyou're transacting. I know what you're buying two. I know what you're renewing on and what you're coming back to be able to pull that all together and not just pull it together in a data cluster. But to be able to actually take those insights and are sorry, take that data and develop insights out of it and then, most importantly, take action on. So one of the announcements we made really was around analytics. And as we pull that into adobe Commerce Cloud enabling our adobe analytics to have some dashboards that roll out, you know, we know we commerce really well. Whether it be to be or be to see, we know what those customers those merchants need to look at, be able to spin up those dashboards right away, so they can not only gather all the data but start seeing the insights immediately so they could take action. >> But what I thought was kind of interesting is is everyone used to think that the transaction was the goal, right? It's all feeding the funnels, all feed to try to get that transaction. What we heard today was so important that a transaction is just one piece of ah, of a much broader experience. Right is the word, but really oven engagement and an ongoing relationship with that individual, whether it be a company or a single person. So I'm interested from your point of view. You guys were all about The transaction is funny. It's weird. It didn't happen earlier. Job is all about, you know, the creative in the marketing and getting it up to that point of transaction. But it's really you guys just want to get in kind of a virtuous cycle where it continues that multiple transactions and multiple experiences that support each other as being really stand alone. >> No, that's I think I agree with that. I mean transactions obviously really important >> to our customers that definitely wanted and that it's necessary. I can't remember the word they used in the keynote, but it's it's definitely important But it's not the animal you know, kind >> of. It's part of the entire experience, right? So when customers are buying today, they're buying experiences. And those experiences include the actual purchase they're making right, the product digital or physical that they're making. But it includes all the way up to that to that experience, all the content they see before then the experience, how they experience the brand before, then on. Then you know, likewise after the transaction, right? How? How? How does the brand follow up and interact with the customer afterwards? Most of our merchants, all of our merch, all of our brands were looking, have lifelong relationships with customers. And so that entire and and experience is >> important. Mark Talk about the community. Expect we covered your show, Magenta. Before the acquisition last year, the key was there. We were. I was very impressed. I had no idea that depth the community that you had in that company when you guys came over. What was the feedback? What's the result? What's the plan when you share some update impact of the community and the role of the community for the commerce cloud? >> Absolutely. I mean the community for us is is near and dear. I mean, it is It is the core of who magenta is and wass on is transferred over now to Adobe. You probably heard this morning shots and you're talking about how important as soon as he got out on stage. How important community wass magenta community. But the broader now adobe community. We've got about three hundred seventy five thousand community members. These include developers, partners that are really court of the functionality. About fifty percent of our code is developed by by the community and developers in the community. That's omit that code back to us on DH. They're the life blood of how we grow and support the business going for >> a fifth between Adobe Magenta cause you mentioned that that might be kind of a nuanced point. You were very community. Lot of open source got a co creation on the product side adobes a creative, absolute density time. But the fit between your culture at Magenta and the Bilby culture and where they are today and where they're going >> now there's that absolutely some overlap in our community and in a lot of our partners are out helping our merchants create content right, create that brand experience. And they leverage the creative side right in the products in the suite of services that the creative side of the House provides. And then that feeds in directly into into driving awareness and marketing and sales. So a lot of overlap. Their >> growth question for you are kind of more of an operational question, you know, in any major shifts. Certainly, Cloud. We've seen that it's here. Been for a long time. But as you start to see, new APS and new kinds of business models emerge that are continue to transform operationalize ng new things is very difficult for an enterprise, our business and sometimes culture. Sometimes it's tech, tech, um, something just don't know what the new environments like tools and technology. So you know, getting something operationalized that's a game changer his heart. How do you look at that? How do you guys approached that market on the go to market on how you guys do with the marketing mix? What some of the things that you do take something that's new and new capability and operationalized for a customer? Yeah, there's a couple >> things. One is the culture which you developed, right? So the people and really working Teo to train and developed a culture and hire the right talent, that is is, quite frankly, just open to change, right? You've got to be agile because I could come in here and tell you five things you've got to do today. Tomorrow will be totally different, right? And so you've got to be You've got to be agile. Build that build that culture of agility. Thie. Other thing I'd say is, you know, find partners who will help you simplify the problem, right? It's very easy to create a lot of complexity when you've got change. But, you know, Chantal did a great job this morning, kind of showing the dashboards that we use internally on. That was through a lot of work and a lot of process to get that. But way had to simplify it down into what are the key metrics that you really need to watch on? I'd say that's the third thing is, you've gotta follow data. You've got to be data driven and develop insights out of that data because things are too fat moving too quickly to have years to develop a gut reaction to it. Right, You've got it. You've got to see the date and you've got to see it when it happens in real time >> and moving fast cuts good. But you apply that to data as well. So that's right. This is what we've got the right >> platform. And we were trying to develop very real time relevant rich platform that you could get that data out in a way that's digestible so you could take action. >> How does a company take advantage of the data that they have? What some approaches that you guys see is low hanging fruit use cases, something overwhelmed with data. Either Number day. We heard from your customer at the Dollar Shave Club talking about There's so many dates, so many data points coming in from multiple directions and going out multiple directions to on the channel that I'm gonna call it. >> How do you get >> a hottie? How'd you get your hands on that data? It's overwhelming. What's what's, um approached? People could take >> eso couple things there. One is, you know, decide before we even start looking at data. What do you think is important, right? So really simplified, clarified down what? What you need to be tracking. And then it's very easy to have twenty different systems that you bring in all separately and try to stitch them together. It's more important. One of things you tried to do with Dobie Commerce Cloud is bring together something that's already kind of pre pre pre integrated together to make it easier to kind of get up and running and get going. Because it is it is very difficult. Teo, pull all that together unless you've got you've got a framework of things working together and then having the dashboards rebuilt. So you, Khun, you can get up and running and then over time you can tweak it and customize it. But But getting those core inside >> we're talking on came before we started about operational versus our operational data verses trying to boil the ocean over. And that's it. That's the best practices are distracted or approach, you see? >> Yeah, Wait, I called a little bit of more operationally I, which is so many different use cases for for making data driven decisions on things that are really top of mind for merchants. Today. We hear a lot about one on one personalization, which you know super important. Particularly you move from being our computer based e commerce to mobile to voice right. Getting that. Getting that personalization right is critical, but there's a lot of things on the back end to that can happen, right? How do you tag pictures? How do tag merchandise? How do you really streamline the filming process? So you're getting the product from the right place at the right person as quickly and cheaply a sponsor. >> One of the questions. One of the comments on the Keen I thought was great from engineering talk part talk track was open day to open a P. I's very critical. We're big believers of that. But as customers or challenged with first party data, they're relying on these platforms like Facebook instagram of the things that are not actually being more open. The stricter access to the data Twitter's all got days out. They get that data hard to get linked in date. It's hard to get Facebook data. Um, how how do you look at those those silos? How should customers be thinking about their data strategy, knowing that some of it might only be able to get through scraping or other techniques. It's can't maybe reliable. So how do you guys look at that? What's, uh, what's the approach that they have more first partied on their site? Or is it there is a methodology or mechanism that they could deploy >> eso no silver, no silver bullet. But I think first and foremost always have to keep the customer first. Right, And so trust and transparency is of the utmost importance on. So it's important and we do this. And everything we built today is to be able to build that trust and transparency, both with our own direct customers, the merchants we may have. But also it's equally important that trust, though, that we're building for that merchant with those with those end customers that that that has to be paramount to everything else. So you know, when in doubt, err on the side of creating real deep trust and transparency with >> customs. Also, talk about the culture and adobe you're now part of the company from Magenta is a good culture. They're good fit, as you mentioned absolutely for the folks watching here and seeing the keynote, the company's transformed and continues to transform with cloud with data on the right way. From our our estimation for the folks that might not be comfortable or not. Might not know Adobe. I should say, What is it about? What's it, what's going on at a Toby? What's what's the magic here? There's a top story >> there. There is, There's a lot. There's there's a lot going on and, you know, the integration with gentle of the last guest. Nine months now, when went by Fast has been It's been phenomenal, I think is, you said not only has there been a strategic fit between the product's set on DH, what were what adobes trying do overall, but a cultural fit is well. They're really dedicated to creating a new environment where people can thrive on being respectful of individuals and really driving in helping transform the world. And so when you've got a mission of really, how do you help digitally transform, whether it be two C or B to B B to be customers? It's amazing. There's just a lot a lot going on. >> Final question. What's your plans for this year? What's your goals? Grow the commerce piece get a chip didn't get available. What's the Your objectives, >> you know, continue to scale up a platform which is just phenomenal. The only one in the industry that really delivers great B to C and B to B experience is on really scale that up and helped deliver, particularly for our larger midmarket enterprise customers help them deliver on the promise that is, that is, that is the digital age >> and for customers. What should they be thinking about? Now? >> You know, it goes back to How do you really develop that? That customer journey that built a brand write The most important thing is your brand and what you're doing there. And how do you customers have? Higher in the end, user customers have higher and higher expectations these days. And how do you really follow them through? The entire customer joined in >> the Holy Grail that we've been chasing for a long time. Now we get some visibility. Yeah, absolutely. It's really coming. Markman hard here on the Q. Thanks for coming on and sharing your insights. Appreciate it. Thank you. Coverage here. I'm John with Jeff with Mark. Stay with us for more after this short break.

>> Announcer: Live from the Wynn hotel in Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering Magento Imagine 2018. Brought to you by Magento. (music fades out) >> Hello everyone welcome back we are here, broadcasting here at the Wynn in Las Vegas for the Magento event here, theCUBE with exclusive coverage 2018, Imagine 2018. And I'm here with John Stockton, who is the Vice President of Product Management at Magento. Tell me about the new product news really modernizing the e-commerce tag and enabling digital growth. Great to have you. Thanks for coming on. >> Great! Thanks for being here. >> So, you guys have a digital experience culture here at the company but one of the things that's interesting is the modern stack of e-commerce needs an upgrade. >> John S.: Right >> It's been talked about for years. You guys are doing that, you've got thousands and thousands of customers and partners you've got product news here. >> John S.: Yep. >> Let's dig into the news, what do you guys have, what are you refreshing, what are you bringing to the table? >> Well it's a really exciting time here to be at Magento. We are announcing a number of big initiatives here at the conference. The first is around our superior shopping experience goal, our goal is to continue to support an evolving consumer culture where more and more people are doing things on mobile devices, more and more people are doing things in store. >> We've been working very closely with Google on their progressive web apps initiative, and we'll be announcing here our PWA developers studio is going to be an early adopter program and generally available at the end of the year. That's going to enable Magento merchants, and our partners, and our ecosystem, to be able to create really cool progressive web apps. Progressive web apps are going to revolutionize the way we experience digital commerce on mobile devices, they're much more performant, much faster. They're going to be the way of the future and I don't think any merchant in the world can afford to ignore them. Our PWA dev studio is going to make it easy for merchants to create those apps, and that's really exciting. >> That's the first big news. >> John S.: That's the first big news. >> Let's dig into that, I know you got two more I want to get to but, this is kind of important. We've been hearing about mobile first for years. >> John S.: Right. >> Certainly Google has put the screws on search results, >> John S.: Absolutely. >> response time on mobile. What's the impact to customers on this news, what does it give them? >> Yeah, for a lot of our customers more than 50% of their transactions today are coming from mobile so it's just a trend that they can't ignore at all. What happens when you take a native app in mobile today is, you might be able to do a bit of work with responsive design but the performance expectations the consumers have for a page loading instantaneously, for no delays in scrolling around, for checkout. Increasingly things like Apple Pay and Google Pay, the ability to just do a facial recognition and actually check-out and pay for something on a phone. That's what consumers are going to expect in the future, and PWA is really the only way you're going to be able to meet those expectations. >> That makes them have to take a web response design, >> John S.: Right. >> and make it feel like a native app. >> John S.: Yes. >> Both performance, and experience. >> John S.: (talking over John F.) Very high performance and very high integration with the actual phone itself. >> Alright so the next announcement is what? >> The next big this is on our Omnichannel initiative we want to enable our merchants to be able to sell effectively in any channel. The big news there is we are going to be releasing a Amazon sales channels module for Magento commerce that enables the Magento merchant to push their catalog out to the Amazon marketplace, do things like dynamic competitive pricing, and then track all that transaction data as their products are sold on Amazon. So from directly within Magento they can manage both channels, and see all their results all in one place. >> So this is kind of interesting. Amazon obviously is Amazon, we know what's going on with those guys. So what's the improvement, I mean obviously you can publish-- >> John S.: Right. >> Amazon marketplace. What's the innovation, where's the new updates, you mention pricing, the relationship with Amazon is it the code native, what's going on? >> The innovation is in the data integration of getting you product catalog into Amazon which is going to be easier than ever before. You're going to have visibility into performance within Amazon directly from Magento, and then all that transaction data is going to come back to Magento. So when you're using Magento commerce or our business intelligence tools, you're going to have a single source of truth for how you're performing across both channels. >> John F.: And plus massive sales opportunity for growth >> Right. >> Just on a sales perspective. (laughing) >> Right, right, yeah, yeah. >> Amazon's the big gorilla. >> Yep. >> Okay so third announcement? >> The third announcement is in our business intelligence planning so we have a Magento business intelligence product is now available to all Magento customers who have a commercial license with us, at no extra cost, so. MBI is a full-stack business intelligence data warehouse solution that tracks all your data from all Magento products, commerce, order management, and rolls it up into great dashboards, visualization tools, allows you to integrate it with Google analytics and other data sources, so. We're collecting rich data on consumers behavior across both your physical store, with our order management solution, and your online properties with Magento commerce, and giving you really an unbeatable combination of data points on your consumers that's going to really unlock a lot of potential value. >> So does this bring more wrangling to the table, less complexity, offline-online kind of perspective? >> Yeah a lot less complexity. It is an out of the box PI solution, it's an out of box data warehouse that integrates the core data that you want. We have a pro edition that allows you to integrate your other data, so you could integrate CRM data or other things. It's a great way to get a single source of truth reporting solution for all of your commerce touch points. >> And that's all customers, no charge, part of the platform? >> Yeah the essential edition is now included no charge, and there is a pro edition that is a premium product. >> So product, you run the product management, which you got to-- >> Yep keep your eye on the prize, you got to look at the engineering, and then look at the customers. You've got to kind of make decisions, so as you look at the growth of commerce, just in general, online. >> Yeah. >> There's no denying that we're going to a whole nother level. >> Yep. >> (laughing) How do you guys prioritize? (laughing) Because I mean, there's like so many things you could work on. >> Yeah, it is-- >> What are some of the guiding principles, how do you guys make these decisions, what's the internal DNA like? Share some inside baseball, what goes on? >> Yeah sure. You know our philosophy is the three pillars I mentioned, superior shopping experiences, omnichannel, and business intelligence, those are areas that we know are durable areas of investment that are going to provide value to a merchant. The fourth one is our open ecosystem, and that's really unique to Magento, so we partner with over eleven hundred partners, we have an open source platform that a community contributes to. We're doing a lot to get a lot more leverage out of that, and that allows us to innovate a lot faster. So for example, the day the Amazon patent expired, we had a community partner submit a one-click order feature into the code base, we ran it through a quality assurance product. And I believe we were the first to market with one-click order. So what happens is, even beyond the core organic development that the internal R&D team is doing, we have so much innovation going on, that's customer driven, partner driven. That gives us a very rich opportunity to go into areas that, even where we are following our partners or our community, we're able to incorporate things into the product as the market demands them. >> You know I think that's a unique and compelling thing that's different I think about you guys that I like is, you know the old model was we got to own everything, >> John S.: Right. >> every little feature. And you know you look at startups out there, oh that's really a feature not a startup, that's the old joke of silicon valley but, the reality is, is that, you have partners that have business, >> John S.: Yep. >> So they could build a really hyper focused feature, >> John S.: Yep. >> Bring it to the table, you incorporate it in through your ecosystem, >> John S.: That's right. >> That's what you're referring to, right? >> Yeah absolutely, and you know, I think the business model around closed platforms is kind of fundamentally flawed in that regard, because the vendor can never keep up with the rate of innovation. Especially not a space like e-commerce where things are happening so fast, it would be impossible for any one vendor to stay on top of it all. >> John F.: So your strategy: Stay to your core pillars >> John S.: Yep. >> Let the ecosystem innovate, you've got the open source which is the playground for more innovation-- >> John S.: Yep. creative ideation. And then you have a pipeline in through the product team. >> Yep. >> For QA, quality assurance kind of thing going on there. >> Absolutely, absolutely. >> And then ship it our to all your customers-- >> That's right. >> Through what, marketplace? >> That's right. Well we have a variety of ways to get out. So our partners can get extensions out to the market through our marketplace, which is the best place to get Magento extensions. We're also doing a core bundled extension program, so we will be announcing tomorrow that we're-- we have three new core bundled extension partners. We're partnering with Vertex for tax, (mumbling) for deferred payments, and Amazon Pay as a payment method. So those are integrations that those vendors have done to Magento, that we have certified and blessed as the highest quality. And merchants who deploy Magento 224 which will include those bundled extensions and turn them on with the flip of the switch. So we're doing a lot more innovation to make those solutions available to customers. >> I mean it's innovative because you have some things that might not be in the product, well we've got resources, there's always the contention for resources, but when you've got partners innovating. I just saw folks, I was taking a lunch break walking around, you got a coin crypto solution here, hey we could do, you know, 400 tokens. >> John S.: Yeah. >> Or I don't even know, it's like thousands of tokens but, if someone wants to do say cryptocurrency. >> John S.: Right. >> A partner steps up, >> Yeah. >> And that's enabled, that's an option >> Yes, yep. >> So today I want to take bitcoin, >> Yep. >> You could fit that in. >> John S.: Yes, absolutely. it also gives us great advantage on our global reach as well because we can work with partners who want to localize this and take us into markets where we don't have direct presence today. But the open platform and the fact that we're so partner friendly and ecosystem friendly, makes it possible for other people to build businesses and to take us into places faster than anybody else. >> We were talking before we came on camera about your previous experience, you've been in the industry for a while, you've seen some waves. We know, we're old enough to see some of those. E-commerce, and again, e-commerce is 25 years old, and you know it's always been kind of monolithic, you know, one directional. >> John S.: Right. You push to an endpoint, yeah you got JSON now endpoints but the demand is for rich experience, consumer to consumer potentially, >> John S.: Right. >> Peer to peer action, >> John S.: Right. >> All this stuffs going on, what attracted you to these guys for you job, and what do you look at in terms of big waves, that you guys want to ride on. >> Yeah, you know what attracted me, Magento is my first opportunity to be at an open source platform company. And so the excitement all around here at this event is really validating that this is a fun place to be and this is a great approach to market, I think it's a much more interesting way to build products than the old school ways are. So I'm really excited about that. You know, to your point about evolving needs, both the omnichannel need and then also, we've been doing a lot of b to b scenarios, so we have customers using Magento in very innovative ways that again, are outside the box of what we intended when we first built the product. We have partners here who are doing marketplace solutions right now, where our customers are hosting marketplaces where other consumers are selling products to each other, which is a really cool use case. We have always had customers using us in a b to b context, even though we didn't have native b to b functionality built in. In two dot two which just came out last year, we made a big investment to beef up some b to b capabilities in the product and we'll be making more investments in those in the coming years as well. >> Everything flows from the b to c because, mobiles expected there-- >> John S.: Yeah. >> Now you're seeing mobile first-- >> John S.: Yeah. >> cloud first-- >> John S.: Yeah. >> for b to b-- >> John S.: Yeah. And they're kind of upping their game-- >> John S.: Yep. >> You got to up your game, you know everything's online now. And a lot of, if not all of our b to c customers have some b to b dimension to their business, right? So it makes sense for their digital platform to serve not only their direct consumer up fronts, but all their commerce initiatives. >> What's the big thing that you see out there, for the b to b customers because I see b to b really, moving faster now-- >> John S.: Yeah. >> Than ever before-- >> John S.: Yeah. >> Because they used to have the old websites-- >> John S.: Right. >> Now they're puttin' rich media on there they want to do some, you know, some for some service-- >> John S.: Yeah. >> Everything's moving digital-- >> John S.: Yeah. >> On b to b-- >> John S.: Yep. >> Is it awakening, is it-- >> John S.: Yeah, no I think-- >> like, they're waking up and smelling the coffee, what's going on? >> I think it is, I don't think, you know, people are people, and whether you're shopping for a blender or you're a procurement officer and you need to buy IT equipment, you have expectations that you're going to be digitally served with a high quality. The market is moving that way very fast, there's a lot of potential to create better experiences for your customer that way. There's a lot of opportunity to get more efficiency out of your processes by bringing them to the digital so that they can carry on. >> And then obviously outsourcing the role of the community is super important. Talk about the labs, Magento labs, how does that fit into all this, we saw some folks up there gettin' awards on keynote today. >> John S.: Yeah. What's this labs thing about? >> So we have a program with our Magento masters where we recognize people for contributions to the community and so we gave out awards yesterday morning for the top contributors. We had in the two dot two dot four release, that's coming out tomorrow, we had over 200 community contributions before submitting. Enhancements to the product, fixes, improvements. Security improvements, performance improvements, so the amount of contribution to the community is still, really, from the community is still really really valuable and we really recognize and reward and support that. >> Real competitive advantage. So I got to ask you the data question. >> John S.: Yeah. >> The role of data's so valuable you're seeing data, whether it's IOT devices being potentially in retail outlets i mean, wearables is a IOT device. >> John S.: Yep. >> You know Apple pay could be considered a wearable, to some degree as a device. But data moving around, having data integrate-- >> John S.: Right. >> Is a huge issue-- >> John S.: Yes. >> How is that impacting your business, obviously can imagine pretty significantly impacting both market intelligence, real-time bidding, real-time user experiences-- >> John S.: Yeah. >> Without data you really can't get near real time. >> John S.: That's absolutely right, yeah. >> What's your view on that? >> So data is going to be the next big revolution, I think, as digital commerce spreads across all panels consumers are going to expect you to know who they are when you walk in the store, you, they, you remember the past transactions and interactions you had with them. You're personalizing your outreach and experience for them. Data is key to all that. Right now we're in a foundation building phase where we're getting all that data into Magento business intelligence, we're building a data lake. We recognize, for our customers, that connecting all that data together and rationalizing it all is a challenge. We think we can do a lot to solve that challenge for them through our business intelligence tools and our data. >> John great to have you on theCUBE sharing the insights, final question for you is what's one or two things that someone might not know about Magento that they should know about? The approach, the products, how you guys build technology, happy customers, let's see one-two things that they should know about, that may not know about. >> I would say I mean, I think people know Magento as an opensource platform, an opensource brand. They may not know that we are having a lot of success up market right now, we are increasingly getting pulled into enterprise businesses and running very large-scale businesses for people. They may not know us as a b to b solution provider, they may think of us as a b to c only solution provider, so we're doing a lot in b to b right now. They may not know how much we've invested in the people of Magento. In the Austin office where I work, we've more than doubled in size in the last year. So we are growing like crazy, we're bringin' a lot of talent to the company and it's a great place to be. >> John F.: Yeah, you've got a great ecosystem. And what's the reason why you guys are being successful, speed, performance, flexibility, all of the above, what's the key thing? >> All of the above, I mean, I think we get a lot of pull from the market, the Magento brand is still very solid, there's a lot of people out on opensource who are looking to upgrade and move up and that creates a great pipeline for us. I think the competitive landscape is, got options on the lower end and options on the higher end that are a little bit old-school. I think we have an advantage in the innovation and the things we're bringin' to the market that's going to serve us well in the future. >> The pressure to go digital all the time, 100%, is really on every ones shoulders these days, everything's digital. >> John S.: Yep. >> John Stockton Vice President of Product Management at Magento here at Imagine 2018 in Vegas, theCUBE's exclusive coverage. Be back with more coverage after this short break. (pop music)

(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)

(upbeat music) >> Narrator: Live from the Wynn Hotel in Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Magento Imagine, 2018. Brought to you by Magento. >> Welcome back to theCUBE, I'm Lisa Martin. We've had a really informative day talking all things commerce, open commerce, and digital commerce innovation at Magento Imagine 2018. I'm joined by Amanda Batista, who is the head of content marketing for Magento. Amanda, thanks so much for all your help in coordinating this. We've had a really educational day with your folks, with your customers and partners. >> Yeah, we've had a really great community. It's been wonderful to have theCUBE here, and I'm so thrilled to be able to be here with you closing out the show. >> So this is the eighth Imagine event, There's over 3000 people here. You guys had some great speakers on stage today. I'm always very excited to see female leaders on stage. >> Absolutely. >> We talked about Baked by Melissa, she was our first guest today sharing her story. You've been growing this event year over year. What is it about #LeadingTheCharge, your hashtag and message for this event, that really differentiates this eighth event from the last several? >> Well #LeadingTheCharge is a really exciting message for us because ultimately we're focused on empowering merchants and developers and really allowing them to not worry about the technology component of things. Whatever you can dream, you can do on Magento. So, #LeadingTheCharge for us here today is really about bringing people together, making connections, and really thinking about, How do you use this community? How do you tap into all these resources? How do you see people that you haven't seen in a while? It's kind of our coming out party, our big coming together. You know, #LeadingTheCharge I think means different things for different folks, but I think for us we're really aiming to empower individuals to do the work that they do really well but also come together. So I actually heard a gentleman say that part of Leading the Charge for him is a matter of making connection. It's almost stepping out as a leader and allowing other people to come together. I think #LeadingTheCharge has been a really nice message for us today and I think our speakers have really brought that to life. >> I agree and with the sentiment that we've heard. Magento started reputation-wise, helping retailers to target the online shoppers and the experiences there. We talked with Peter Sheldon today about what you guys are doing in really formalizing how you're helping businesses, B2B organizations. There's so much opportunity that's really being driven by all of us as consumers and we have this expectation that we can get anything, anywhere, anytime. >> That's right. >> And have it delivered day or night. Amazon sets the bar really high. You guys had Amazon on main stage this morning talking about the fact that there's now 100 million Prime subscribers and how half of Amazon's revenue doesn't come from products they sell, this third-party marketplace just kicks open the doors of opportunity- >> Amanda: Right. >> for businesses from small to large alike. >> Yeah, I think it's really exciting, too, because, you know we can't all compete on price. We can't all be Amazon, but I think as we're really encouraging merchants to think about, What are you offering that's special? What are you doing from a content standpoint? Obviously, content is near and dear to me, that's my bread and butter and what I've been doing for a long time, but we really think about, what are we offering people that's value-add? Is it an added catalog, is it a manual? Is it something that helps you do your job better? Is it something that helps you go back to your organization and feel celebrated and feel excited?" I think when it comes to how we're empowering people, we're really focused on, from a content perspective, enabling you to, again, not really worry about the tech component, but think about how you can innovate your business. That's really important to us. >> Well, that's one of the things that Melissa Ben-Ishay, she's product officer at Baked by Melissa Cupcakes and how- >> Amanda: Sweet it is. >> I still want, it is, and I still want a cupcake. >> Amanda: Yes! >> It was very evident when we were talking with her that she gets, because of technology, that makes things simple for folks like herself, it allows her not to just grow the business, to open more stores, to reach hundreds of thousands of people, but to do so in a way that she doesn't have to worry about the technology. >> Amanda: Right, right. >> And that really- >> That's a great example, really, for us. I think when we look at who we're looking to enable, you know, Melissa started a business ten years ago, was let go from her job and said, Let me take a passion and bring it to life with business. They had e-commerce even before they had stores. They had e-commerce before they were up and running. I think using that as a linchpin, as a springboard to really bring her business to life, delivering a hundred cupcakes on foot on the New York City subway. I'm from New York, I ride the subway, I wouldn't want to do it with a hundred cupcakes, frankly, but these are the sort of bootstrap methods that she was enabled to do not worrying about that sort of tech component, right? She's bootstraps, she only had about five founders, five people around her with her business. Really great to hear from her and I don't see any cupcakes anywhere but I'm dying for one. >> Me too! >> Or five. >> We need to get some. One of the things that you mentioned, content, earlier, in being a content marketer, look at media as an example, with Netflix and Spotify and Amazon, and what's happened to traditional media. It's now that the way a service is delivered is as important as the content >> Absolutely. >> and what we've heard a lot from your customers that have been on the program today is they have the opportunity to deliver services in a responsive way, and in a way that's really personalized, which is really key, right? As consumers, we all want to have an experience that's tailored to us, and we've heard that as sort of an enabling capability that Magento is helping. We had a gentleman from Coca-Cola on, talking about the Share a Coke experience and how that started as a program in Australia. >> Amanda: Right. >> With one bottler, then went to Europe, then became something that was focused in store, and then the consumers are going, Hey, Coca-Cola, I can't find a bottle with my name on it. And it became this really big program for them, that they had to figure out, How do we do this in the U.S. with 70 bottlers? They needed technology that would allow them to identify and have this visibility of inventory, which you guys allow them to do, but to enable their customers to have an experience with a personalized bottle of Coca-Cola. >> Right. >> Amazing how the technology opens up doors like that, and allows these businesses, whether it's something as an establishment like Coca-Cola, or a Baked by Melissa, to be able to deliver this relevant, personal experience, at the touch of a button. It's Amazing. >> Well, listen, and it's non-negotiable, right? Think about your own experiences as a consumer. Who are you shopping with? I'm shopping with brands that understand me, that know what I need, that are offering value-add. You know, you might also revolutionize the way that we view our experiences, and we really don't have patience. Like you said, we have digital, everything is very quick, and I think the experience is the differentiator. We're really focused, again, on taking the technology out of your planning equation so that you can focus on what are you offering? What are you delivering? How are you delighting? That's a big, big area of opportunity and I think what you do to delight and engage and if you're using data intelligently, and not just the nitty gritty of data, but also simple things, the way that you welcome people via email, the way you engage on Instagram. There's a number of ways to do things that don't really require a lot of planning, a lot of cost, and so in our content efforts, we're really encouraging merchants to think about that. How do you do things in a sort of home-grown way without spending a lot of time or money? We have to be agile, we have to be quick as marketers, I certainly know that, that's the world I live in, and again, it's non-negotiable. I think as a consumer, if I don't feel that you understand me, if I don't feel that you're paying attention to the things that I'm buying or not buying, I'm going somewhere else. I'm going to go to a place that makes me feel as though I'm going to be fulfilled and delighted. I think delight is such an understated thing, but we're here at the Wynn which does a wonderful job with experience and everywhere you go it's so delightful and wonderful. >> Lisa: It is delightful! >> I came back to the room last night and my computer cord was just rattled up ever so gently, and I thought, That's delightful! You know, I Instagrammed that. That's a perfect example of providing experience that is superior. >> Speaking of experience, we just had the gentleman from the Accent Group on, Mark Teperson. It was so interesting how they've taken this company down in Australia and New Zealand, with multiple, many, many, many brands of footwear. And, you know, the online and the physical world have been merging in retail for a while now, but what they're wanting to do, to click and collect, and to create this in-store experience. It was such an interesting way of thinking about and hearing from a Chief Digital Officer say, We want to be able to enable people, especially mobile first, we're sitting on the couch with these things often, but to enable them to be able to come into my store and have an experience. That word is, we heard that referenced in many different times today, the Accent Group was a great example of that, as well as when we had your V.P. of Strategy on saying, A lot of cases depending on the, whether it's B2B or B2C, it's not mobile too, it's mobile only. It's not just leveraging technology and data and analytics to understand what I want as a consumer, but it's how I want to consume it. So it's what I was saying earlier about we're seeing this level playing field of how services are delivered, equally as important as the content that you're going to deliver to me. >> Yeah, absolutely. Again, non-negotiable, right? This idea of an omni-channel experience bridging the gaps between online and in-store, like you said, we're on the couch. I almost never shop on a computer any more, right? I'm mobile, we're enabled, we have PayPal, we our credit cards saved. I think to keep that momentum going, you want it to be a seamless experience. How many times have you gone online and found that an item is supposed to be available in the store. When you go, it's not there, right? I've even done due diligence as a savvy shopper who works in retail and says, Let me call the store and make sure it's there. There's really no margin for error there, because when we talk about experience, if you do go in store, and if you do take the initiative to make that purchase and take time out of your day, right, we're all busy people. I think mobile and digital has made it easy, especially Amazon Prime revolutionized that. (mimics beeping noise) Two days, it's on your doorstep. I think as we look to see who's sort of mimicking that experience, I think an easy way to do it, is simply put, have your systems connected, ensure that things are integrated, ensure that your inventory visibility is on point. It's a non-negotiable experience, really. >> Well, Amanda, we've had a blast at Magento Imagine 2018. Our first one, looking forward to being back next year. Thank you for putting together a great array of guests. I know we've learned a ton about this. I won't look at online shopping again the same. We want to thank you for helping us have a really enlightened and delightful conversation. >> And likewise, we've loved having theCUBE. You guys have been wonderful. I've learned a great deal and it's been really nice spending this time with you. So thanks for having me, Lisa. >> Absolutely. We hope you've had a delightful experience today with us on theCUBE. We've been live at Magento Imagine 2018. Check out theCUBE.net where you can find all the replays of the segments that we filmed today. You can also find the editorial components on SiliconANGLE.com. I'm Lisa Martin for theCUBE. We'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: Live from the Wynn Hotel in Las Vegas. It's theCUBE. Covering Magento Imagine 2018. Brought to you by, Magento. >> Welcome back to theCUBE, our continuing coverage of Magento Imagine 2018. We're at the Wynn in Las Vegas. You can see it's happy hour behind me. I'm Lisa Martin, we are joined by Mark Teperson the Chief Digital Officer of Accent Group, customer of Magentos'. Thanks so much for stopping by theCUBE and having a chat. >> Thanks Lisa, great to be here. >> So you are an award finalist, the Imagined Excellence Awards are what, in just about an hour and a half. But this is really cool, you are a finalist in several categories. The best in class fulfillment with Platypus Shoes. The best mobile experience with Athlete's Foot. And you yourself are up for Commerce Leader of the Year, wow. >> Yeah. >> I feel like I should be asking for your autograph. >> No please, please, look it's really humbling to have been nominated for so many awards. I think, the thing for me is that it's a huge acknowledgement of the work of the entire team that makes this happen. You know, I have the privilege of being the face of it. But it is an extraordinary team that I get to lead and work with across the organization that really kind of makes all of the magic happen. So, I'm representing them tonight as well. >> Awesome. So tell our viewers who Accent Group is. Where you're located. All that good stuff before we kind of get into all the magic. >> Yeah sure. So the Accent Group Limited is a publicly listed company in Australia. We own and operate nine different retail formats and about 13 different wholesale distribution licenses. We are the largest footwear retailer in Australia. We have 445 stores across both Australia and New Zealand. We turn over in excess of around $800,000,000. So a big business in Australia. >> A big business, many many brands as well from Doc Martens to Timberlands to Sperry Top-sider. So quite a diverse set of brands as well. >> Yeah, look it's, one of the great things about my role is I get to work across the continuum of kind of consumers. And the way I describe it is, is I get to work, that we see everything from first walkers to last walkers and everything in between. And so, from a digital perspective that gives us a really unique opportunity to track and observe the behavior of consumers and their adoption rates of different technologies and different consumer patterns. Which allows us to perhaps be a little bit more responsive and a little bit more considered in our investments of technology. >> That's what we want as consumers right, we want a personalized experience. Mobile, huge. Mobile, pointing at the wrong thing, tablet whatever. We want that, we want, wouldn't we be marketed to but we want to have an experience that's relevant as that's seamless as well. How did you go about, well talk to us about the digital transformation of Accent Group. You've been there a long time. >> Mark: Yeah. >> How are you leveraging technology over the last few years to transform and be able to facilitate a true omni-channel business. >> Yeah look its a great question, it's been a long journey for us. You know this didn't happen overnight. This has been a very long journey. It was initially really backed by our board and we started on this journey five years ago. I've had fantastic support from our CEO, through the transformation process. And that really set the path for us to be able to start transforming ourselves. I think lots of retailers get it wrong when it comes to technology. They make the cardinal sin of building monuments to themselves. You know they build things that they think are great representations of their brand. But if they just stopped and considered you know, what does the consumer really want, what is that unmet need of the consumer or what is that problem that I'm trying to solve? I think we'd all make better investments and deliver better experiences for consumers. And, so we've been really diligent in kind of thinking about and understanding what our consumer was looking for, from us. And, really prioritizing, you know, the million things that we could be doing to a really strong set of, of foundation building blocks, that would set ourselves up for a digital transformation and hopefully a very prosperous future. >> So we mentioned the awards that your a finalist for. Talk to us about what you're doing with Magento, from your seat as the Chief Digital Officer. What were some of the key criteria that you said, you know we don't want to fall into the same trap that we've seen a lot of other retailers fall into and build a monument to ourselves. We're going to listen to consumers and be able to create this responsive experience for them that obviously reaps a lot of financial rewards for us. What were some of the key criteria that you set out with, saying we've got to be able to have technology that enables A, B, C. >> Yeah look, so when we were thinking about how to bring our strategy and our vision to life, there were a couple of things that we were really looking for. One was flexibility and the ability to, realize, I suppose, re-imagine a consumer experience. So we needed that flexibility and because we have so many brands that we retail and we represent, we needed something that could be multi-site, multi-platform as well. So that was some of the key considerations that we came to. But when we were thinking about the consumer experience it was really about the delivery of that front end experience. So, how do you deliver a really great click and collect experience for a consumer. How do we deliver, ship from store, with a high level in degree of accuracy for the consumer so that we don't disappoint them. And now as we kind of look forward, we're looking at how we can deliver same day delivery in three hour delivery, not just in a single city but across the entire country of Australia and even New Zealand. By re-imagining our stores not only as experience centers for consumers to really touch and feel the product but as distribution centers to be able to get product to customer much faster. And Magento has really enabled us to transform and realize that experience that we re-imagined for our customers. >> So I was telling you before we went live that I watched the video. The video testimonial that you guys have done with Magento and with the case study. And, I am a stats person. I love stats because it's really the voice of the customer is the best brand validation any vendor can get. But being able to show a positive business outcome that is quantitative, is huge. >> Mark: Yeah >> You guys achieved with one of your brands, a 10X increase in sales growth, in 10 months. >> Mark: Yeah >> Tell us a little bit about that. >> Look that was unexpected. I think it blew everybody away. We took a great brand and a great business, Platypus Shoes. And this brand is really geared up for the Millennial consumer. Really deeply ingrained in the culture of Millennial life. We sell fantastic brands, Nike, Addi, Vans and Timberlands through that business. And we have a fantastic in-store experience. And so our digital experience was just really kind of dragging the chain. It wasn't living up to that expectation that the consumer had, once they've experienced our physical retail. So we took an old platform and we decided to take the plunge into M2. We were one of the very first enterprise customers on M2. And in the delivery of that platform we launched and very soon after, followed up with click and collect. And ship from store, to really enhance and connect the consumer experience. Lots of people talk to this vision of omni-channel. It's much harder to execute. It's much easier in theory than it is in practice. >> Of course, yeah. >> But what we learnt in a very short period of time was that the consumers really wanted to transcend our channels. And they loved the experience that they were getting in each of the channels, separately but together as well. And so this halo effect, we had so much brand equity with our Platypus business that as soon as we were able to deliver on that unmet need that the customers were telling us that they wanted, they came to us in droves. And so we had a 10X increase in sales in 10 months which is a pretty staggering outcome. It's been fantastic for the whole business. >> It's interesting that you talk about the in-store experience. What are some of the other benefits that the stores are getting? I imagine if you can do like ship to store, there's going to be more store traffic as a result of having this seamless experience for the customers. >> Yeah. In the whole strategy when we think about omni-channel strategy, the best, the very best channel for a consumer to actually engage with us in and purchase is click and collect. And I'll tell you why. Because in click and collect, what you've done is you have captured that online demand that exists for products and they've said to you that I actually want to come and pick it up in your store. And when they come and pick it up in your store, by doing that the 12 other retailers that they have to walk through in the mall to kind of get to you. There not going to shop there because they have committed money, they've committed funds to your business. And so that gives us a fantastic opportunity when that customer walks into your store, you know that they are a serious consumer. And that gives us great additional opportunities to introduce new products or experiences to that customer. So by capturing that demand online and driving them into that in-store experience, we get to showcase the best of both environments. That really savvy fast, fun, content lead digital experience and that sensory experience in-store. Where you get to feel and touch the product and talk to our awesome team members. And really have a fun experience buying shoes. You know the wonderful thing about footwear is and I always joke about it, is that unlike the apparel space and fashion, shoes don't make you feel fat or thin. They just make you feel good. >> That is true. I feel really good in the shoes I'm wearing today. >> There you go. >> So, huge success with launching this with Platypus. Like you said, it even kind of surprised you guys. Do you have a line out the door of the next, from a strategic vision perspective, the dominoes all lined up. Ready to just launch this thing. >> Yeah, absolutely. So I think one of the things that's led us to be really successful is the discipline that we have around how we roll out strategy. And supported by a phenomenal team across the entire Accent Group. I think what's really important to kind of acknowledge is, is that it's not one person, it's not one division that makes this stuff possible. It's an entire organization. And it's entire groups of people that come together to really make this possible. So some of these initiatives involve more than 50 people across the entire organization representing every facet of the business. And so through the discipline that we bring to our strategy process, we've got a really, well planned pipeline of product and innovation that comes over the next 12 months. In fact our pipeline feels pretty full at the moment. Some of that looks like endless aisles. So what we've done was ship from store for our digital business in terms of driving and fueling sales, is in reverse. So endless aisle gives stores that same capability. So our regional store that might not have the full assortment of product can now tap into $110,000,000 worth of inventory across our entire business. >> Lisa: Find it anywhere. >> Find it anywhere and we can get it to that customer and not only will we get it to them free of charge. We'll do that next day. And that's a pretty amazing proposition for a consumer. In addition to that we're looking to roll out same day and three hour delivery again across the entire country. Both Australia and New Zealand. That requires a huge amount of coordinated effort a lot of integration, a lot of sales process. To make sure that we can, I'm not even sure if it's a word, systematize you know, how you do this because it's all very well to have this capability plugged into a business, but you've got to be able to deliver that fantastic experience for the consumer. When they un-box that product or when they come in-store to pick up that click and collect order, that it doesn't feel like a foreign experience for the sales team who are serving those customers. And the customer feels like it's a really well thought out process. >> So as we look back at your last question. The digital transformation that you're on with the Accent Group and the time that you've spent there, what excites you about you know the rest of 2018. Is it being able to take on advanced technologies like machine learning and Artificial Intelligence to make that experience transcendent across digital and physical stores, even better? >> Yeah you know, I often get asked the question, "What keeps you awake at night?" And they're two things. The first one is, the competition that doesn't exist today. And that includes technology so the rapid evolution and adoption of technology and how that can disrupt the market. And the second thing is, what the customer wants tomorrow. Those are two very salient things that keep me awake at night. So what keeps me excited I suppose is looking at the success and the way in which we adopt and roll technology and strategy through the business. It's not technology for technology sake. It's really easy to get caught up in the hype around some things so I've been following the A.I. trend now for three years. It finally feels like it's reaching commercialization in the market. And I think in the next 12 months we certainly will see a much greater adoption of parts of Artificial Intelligence in how it can power better consumer experiences and perhaps even better intelligence in decision making in our organization. It's a very humbling thought to think that, you know whilst I know a lot about the industry and space, there a 1,500 things that happened yesterday and the day before that and you just can't keep up. And nobody has the monopoly on good ideas so events like this and getting out and talking to people and figuring out you know, what is that next big idea. What is that trend that's riding you know in the market. That's how we try and figure out what the next big thing is going to be. >> And we've felt that all day with commerce is limitless, opportunities are limitless as well. Mark, thanks so much for, >> Not a problem. >> stopping by and telling us about what guys are doing down in A (mumbles), it sounds, pretty awesome. >> Fantastic, thanks for having me. >> Absolutely our pleasure. We want to thank you for watching theCUBE, we are live at Magento Imagine 2018, in Las Vegas. I'm Lisa Martin. Stick around, we'll be right back to wrap up the day. (light music)

>> Announcer: 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, I'm Lisa Martin, live at the Wynn, Las Vegas at Magento Imagine 2018. We've had a really cool day here talking about lots of facets of commerce, e-commerce, and really talking about commerce as a center of gravity around digital transformation. If you drink Coke like I do, you're going to be pretty excited to hear our next guest. We've got Todd Skidmore, the manager of eCommerce from Coca-Cola. Todd, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thanks for having me. >> So I'm super thirsty now, there's probably some Coke bottles behind us. >> (laughs) Yeah, exactly. >> So everybody knows the iconic Coca-Cola brand and the Share A Coke branding that you guys have been using a long time. As retail, and really as consumers, as we've really started to change the way, not just that we buy, but the experience that we want to have, I'd love to hear the journey that you guys are on at Coca-Cola to make a product that's been around for how long, really personal. So talk to us about what the Share A Coke journey is, and let's start with why you even started it. >> Perfect. Yeah, so the campaign actually started really as an opportunity to connect with consumers in a more personal way, and it was an in-store campaign. It started in Australia, actually, in 2011, and was hugely successful, so it moved its way across the world and made it to the U.S. in 2014 and of course, you can imagine the U.S. as big as it is, and we have the distribution, and complexities, and manufacturing, took a few years to bring it, but it was hugely successful in 2014, but of course, success breeds opportunities, and with that, people started going, "Well, I can't find my name on a bottle "in the store, how can I get my name?" Posting on social media, et cetera, which is great exposure, but we had an opportunity, so when we brought the program back for the next summer, the campaign in-store as well, we also brought in our first foray into direct-to-consumer e-commerce where you are able to go onto the site, personalize a bottle yourself, and get any name on a bottle. You weren't restricted to what was in the store, or even if it was in the store and you couldn't find it, now you had an opportunity to bring that to life. So that's kind of been the journey, and that was three years ago when we launched the site, and now we've gone from just basically selling one skew, which was a Coke bottle, infinitely customizable one skew, but one skew, to now we have over 6,000 skews on the site, including licensed merchandise, lots of different bottle options, all kinds of stuff, so. Really, the whole thing has been about connecting with consumers, listening to what consumers want, and then bringing those experiences and the brand in a really special and unique way. >> I love that you're listening and taking that consumer feedback and identifying by doing so, I imagine, using big data and analytics, to then identify additional business models and revenue streams for Coca-Cola. >> Yeah, so, the crazy thing is we started it and the big thing was you can get your name on a bottle. Well, then we started realizing by looking at the data that people were using it for weddings, and events, and all kinds of things, and reunions, and graduation parties, and so being able to customize it and have it for an event like that brings really a special, you know, the Coca-Cola to those occasions, which is exactly what we want as a company, is to be a part of the communing and occasions like that, so being able to use that data to drive our products and also drive our marketing. So now we don't just talk about getting your name on a bottle, we talk about these occasions and marketing. We have a whole wedding page, talking about weddings, et cetera, so. >> Wow! That's cool. So you guys are a award finalist here at Magento Imagine 2018 for the Imagine Excellence Awards in the Customer Insights category, and it's kind of (mumbles) with what you were just saying in terms of listening to customers, but also from a data-driven standpoint, you mentioned marketing, and I'm a marketer, and marketing is now a science because there is so much data available, but as consumers we want that. We want an experience, whether its Coca-Cola or some other retailer, we want them to know enough about us, to not steal our data, but to be able to deliver a seamless experience regardless of channel, that's relevant to me as a person, as a human. And that's something that you guys will find out, I guess tonight at the awards ceremony. >> Yeah we'll see what happens tonight, but yeah. So we definitely try to use as much data as we can to inform where we're going to take the next program, marketing campaign, et cetera. So it's listening to what people are buying or even saying in the reviews, et cetera, so. >> So in terms of the genesis done in Australia, and then brought it to the states as an in-store program seasonal, a few years ago you've launched the online direct-to-consumer, I imagine, mobile, tablet, any way that they want to consume it. >> Yep. >> Talk to us about opening up this channel, direct-to-consumer and what that is helping achieve from a business perspective. >> Well, I think it's another way to sort of certainly learn more about what our consumer wants, and we certainly get probably the best data that you can get on an eCommerce site than you get even compared to almost any other type of platform or way we've had in the past. We've had rewards programs in the past which was also another way to get great consumer data, but this is one where you absolutely know if someone makes a purchase they're making an investment in your brand, which means you know that's a valuable customer, and that's a valuable consumer that you can then understand that's the type of people that we want to be associated with, market to, and have them be a part and connected to our brand. >> So the responsiveness to your consumers is quite clear. If we take a look at, you said 6,000 skews now? >> Todd: Yeah. >> So it's expanded beyond the actual Coca-Cola bottle. So many different opportunities. How are you using technology to help manage and track all these different skews and ensure that supply and demand is in sync. >> So, we do the best that we can while-- we are, I will be honest with you, we're a pretty scrappy bunch within Coca-Cola, and we have an analytics team, or person I should say, a 'team', person, and we rely on that to pull that data down and analyze it and take a look at what's happening. We're of course reviewing that and reacting to it as quickly as can. I talked about an example in my speaking session earlier today where, at Coachella, TeenVogue picked up one of our outfits and took a picture of a model there. It started trending on Instagram, and it was only offered in-store, in our brick and mortar stores. We were able to get it up online within 24 hours so we could start reacting, so of course that just happened days ago. >> Right. >> So, we're really trying to be progressive and fast and agile about reacting to what consumers are interested, because they were on Instagram going, "Hey, where can I buy this?" et cetera, and so being able to sort of react and do those things is exciting. >> Absolutely. One of the things that I find interesting, and we've talked a lot about this today with out guests, is the conveniences that we expect as consumers, right? We want to be able to go to any device wherever we are and buy whatever we want, and expect that it's going to show up in a little brown box on the doorstep two days later. How are you seeing trends in the consumer space spill into the corporate space? >> Maybe reword that again so I... >> So you're selling to consumers, and you're doing a lot of pivoting, "Hey, they want this, they want that." >> Todd: Oh, okay, so like corporate orders? >> Exactly, exactly. >> Yeah, I mean, I think really we all know that the whole business world and everybody's lives are coming together. It used to be traditional, it was like work was my work and personal was my personal. That's not the case anymore, and also with e-commerce sites, b to b sites now are becoming more like d to c sites. People are expecting much more of it, expectations are much higher from what you're going to deliver on a b to b site. So I think all these worlds are sort of merging, and I think from a corporate perspective, they see an opportunity with a Coca-Cola brand, and we want to be able to deliver that on the corporate side as well, so. >> So is that business growing then, in terms of companies coming to the website to, like you see with, you said weddings and other occasions, is corporate buyers now kind of at that level? >> Yeah, so we even have hotels buying for events on our site now, so we have some relationships there that we've tapped in to, which is the great thing about Coca-Cola is we have all these partnerships with properties, entertainment, et cetera, and we try and bring all those things. That's been a big focus of mine, is taking advantage of the things that Coke already has in place, and bringing them to a new way, and a new way to sort of participate in those partnerships via the bottles basically. >> So the website is by... >> Well, you can go to cokestore.com, that's the easiest way, or shareacoke.com. The reason we've sort of moved to the cokestore.com, think about it, it was kind of a program to begin with, now Share A Coke is just a piece of sort of an overall direct-to-consumer offering that we have. >> So, exciting opportunity tonight with being a finalist with this award, what are some of the things that you're looking forward to as 2018 continues in terms of, maybe some of the next iterations of products or opportunities based on what you're hearing from your consumers? >> Yeah, I think the next year or so is really going to be interesting and where we go in terms of direct-to-consumer and what things we can push into further, I mean we know we've got a really good, solid, we know that we need to to be able to offer something that is special and unique so we will continue to follow that path of, we're not going to try and compete in selling something that you can get everywhere else. It just doesn't make sense. But we want to be able to offer things that we can truly offer that are unique from what you can get elsewhere. >> And continue that personalization, and relationship. >> Yeah, that'll be driving our roadmap forward will we always be unique, special, personal, exactly. >> Awesome, well Todd, thanks so much for stopping by and sharing about Share A Coke. >> Yeah. >> Now I know where to go to order a bottle since you didn't bring me bottles that say Lisa on them. >> I should've brought you a bottle, yes. >> That's okay, next time. >> Yeah, alright, perfect, thanks. >> Thanks so much again for your insight, really interesting conversation. >> Alright, thanks for having me. >> We want to thank you for watching theCUBE. I'm Lisa Martin, live at Magento Imagine 2018. I'm going to go get myself a Coke. I'll be right back with my next guest, see you then.

>> 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 continuing our coverage live from the Wynn Las Vegas at Magento Imagine 2018. We've had a really exciting day talking about commerce and how it's limitless and changing dramatically. Joining me next is Sucharita Kodali, the vice president and principal analyst at Forrester. Sucharita, it's great to have you on theCUBE. >> Thanks for having me, Lisa. >> So commerce is limitless. We've been hearing this thematically all day. You primarily are working with retailers on their digital strategies. And you've been doing this for a long time. Let's talk about the evolution that you've seen in the retail space with everybody expecting to have access to whatever they want to buy in their pockets. >> Right, right, right. I would say, so I've been working in the retail industry for the last two decades. I've been an analyst for the last 10 plus years. I've really seen a number of changes. And if I had to just summarize the biggest changes, one is just the inventory across different retail channels. So, that's definitely been a huge huge one. It's like, how do you, how do you order online, but then fulfill the item from a physical store or fulfill the item from another store? So those are, that's basically the digital transformation of retailers. Those are investments that companies like WalMart and Target have really been doubling down on and focusing on. The second big change is Amazon. And they single-handedly have transformed the retail industry. They have increased consumer expectations. And what Amazon's also done is reinvented retail as a business model. Because it is no longer about just selling product and being profitable selling that product. Amazon actually is not profitable with a lot of the items that it sells. It makes money in other ways. And it is probably what I would describe as America's first retail conglomerate. And that becomes a really interesting question for other companies to compete, do you have to become a retail conglomerate? Then, the third big change is just brand selling direct to consumer. I remember when I started at Forrester, my very first project was with a large consumer electronics company that asked, Well, should we even sell directly to consumers? There's channel conflict and issues with our distributors. And now, that's not even a factor. It's sort of table stakes you have to sell direct to consumer. And that's probably where we'll continue to see a lot of retail sales in the future. >> So the Amazon model, we expect to be able to get whatever we want whenever we want it, have it shipped to us either at home or shipped to us so we can go pick it up at a store. It's really set the bar. In fact, they just announced the other day that a hundred million Amazon Prime members. I know people that won't buy something if it's not available through Prime. But I think this morning the gentleman that was on main stage from Amazon said at least 50% of their sales are not products they sell, they're through all of the other retailers that are using Amazon as a channel as part of their omni-channel strategy. If you think of a retailer from 20 years ago, how do they leverage your services and expertise and advice to become omni-channel? Because as today, you said essentially it's table stakes for companies to have to sell to consumers. >> Yeah, yeah. There are so many questions that really require, I call it destroying the retail orthodoxies. And retail has historically been about buyers and merchandisers buying goods. There's the old expression in retail, You stack 'em high and watch 'em fly. And that is just where buyers would, Take a company like Toys R Us, they would basically take what Mattel and Hasbro told them to buy. They would buy a ton of it, put it in stores. And because there was less competition back in the '80s, consumers actually would buy that merchandise. And unfortunately, the change for retailers is that consumers have so much more choice now. There's so such more innovation. There are small entrepreneurs who are creating fabulous products, consumer tastes have changed. And this old paradigm of Mattel and Hasbro, or kind of fill in the blank with whatever vendors and suppliers, pushing things is no longer relevant. So, there was just an article in the journal today about how Hasbro sales were down by double digits because Toys R Us is now going to go out of business. So those are the kinds of things that retailers who did not adjust to those changes, they are the ones that really suffer. They don't find ways to develop new inventory, they don't find new channels for growth, and they don't protect their own. They don't build a moat around their customers like Amazon has done, or they don't find ways to source inventory creatively. That's where the problems are. >> You think that's more of a function of a legacy organization; having so much technology that they don't know how to integrate it all together? What do you think are some of the forcing functions old orthodoxies that companies that don't do it well are missing? >> Yeah, it's a lot of it is just in the old ways of doing business. So, a lot of it is being heavily dependent, for instance, on buyers and merchandisers buying things. I mean, one of the biggest innovations that Amazon realized was that, look you can sell things without actually owning the inventory. And that is, their entire, what we call the third party marketplace, and that is just so simple. But if you were to ask a buyer at a major retailer a decade or two ago, "Why do you have to buy the inventory?" their response would be, Well, you have to buy the inventory, that's just the way it is. And it's like, well why? Why don't you try to find a new way to do business? And they never did. But it took Amazon to figure that out. And the great irony of why so many retailers continue to struggle is that Amazon has exposed the playbook on how to sell inventory without owning it. And so few retailers to this day have adopted that approach. And that's the great irony I think, is that that's the most profitable part of Amazon's business is that third party marketplace. And every retailer I've talked to is like, Oh, it's really hard. We can't do that. But, the part of Amazon's business that everyone is looking to imitate is their fast shipping. Which, is the most expensive part of their business. Amazon is only able to afford the fast free shipping because of the third party marketplace. Other retailers want to get the fast free shipping without the marketplace. And it just doesn't make any sense. And that's really the heart of the challenge is that they just don't think about alternative business models. They don't want to change the way that they've historically run their businesses. And some of this could mean that merchants are not as powerful in organizations. And maybe that's part of the pushback is that, there could be a lot of people who lose jobs. The future will be robo-buyers and financial services you have robo-advisors, why not robo-planners in retail? >> So one of the keys then, of eliminating some of the old orthodoxies for merchants is to be able to pivot and be flexible. But it has to start from where in an organization from a digital strategy perspective? Where do you help an organization not fall into the Toys R Us bucket? >> Yeah, I think a lot of it does have to start with merchandising and putting in some interesting digital tools to help merchants be more flexible. So, you want to flex to supply and demand. And some of that comes with integrating marketplaces into your own experience. Some of it can be investing in 3D printers that can make things that are plastic or metals based on demand. That's something that I always wondered why Toy R Us didn't, for instance, make Fidget Spinners on demand. Why did you have to get them with a six month leave time from China, it never made any sense. You can scale service, so use technology to match great store associates with a customer who may have a question. And you don't have to be in the same store. It can be a Facetime call with somebody who is far away. But very few retailers do that. And finally, the last bit is really to look at new alternative business models and finding new ways of making money beyond just selling inventory. >> That's really key because there are so many oppurtunities when companies go omni-channel of not just increasing sales and revenue, but also reducing attrition, making the buying process simple and seamless. Everybody wants one click, right? >> Right. >> Super seamless, super fast, and relevant. It's got to be something if you're going to attract my business, you need to be able to offer something where you know me to a degree. >> Absolutely. >> Or know what it is I might have a propensity to buy. >> Absolutely. And that's the entire area of personalization. And that personalization can be anything from a recommendation that I give you. It can be proactively pushing a recommendation. That's what companies like Stitch Fix do is I tell you what I want and then they send you a box in the mail of things I think you would like and oh, by the way are your size and within your budget. It can be customization. One of Nike's most successful parts of their business is their Nike ID program which allows you to customize shoes according to colors and different sort of embellishments that you may like. And that's exactly the kind of thing that more retailers need to be looking at. >> What are some of the trends maybe that a B2B organization might be able to love or some of the conveniences that we have as consumers and we expect in terms of-- Magento, I was looking on their website the other day and a study that they've done suggests 93 percent of B2B buyers want to be able to purchase online. So, new business models, new revenue streams, but it really is a major shift of sales in marketing to be able to deliver this high velocity low touch model. What are some of the things that a business like a Magento, could learn from say a Nike with how they have built this successful omni-channel experience? >> Well, interestingly I think one of the most important things to recognize is that every B2B buyer is also a B2C buyer. And their expectations are set by their experiences in B2C. So, if you have everything from all of the information at your fingertips, all of that information is optimized for mobile devices. You have different ways to view that information, you have all of your loaded costs, like shipping, or tax, or if there's cross-border. All of the information related to the time to ship, any customs and duties, all of that needs to be visible because in any experience that you have with say a site like Amazon, you're going to get that information. So, the expectation is absolutely there to have it in any situation whether it's B2B or whether it's buying components or kind of very long tail items. That's basically the cost of doing business at this point, is that you have to deliver all of the information that the customer wants and needs. And if you don't, the customer is just going to opt to go purchase that product at whatever destination offers it. >> Somewhere else. >> And somebody will. That's the challenge when you have 800 thousand Plus eCommerce sellers out there selling every product imaginable in the both B2B and B2C landscape. >> So, on the data side there's so much data out there that companies have any type of business to be able to take advantage of that. I know that there's, BI has so much potential. Are you hearing retailers start to embrace advanced analytics techniques, AI machine learning, Where are they with starting to do that? I know that some eyeglass companies have virtual reality augmented reality type of apps where you can kind of try on a pair of frames. Where are you seeing advanced analytics start to be successful and help retailers to be able to target buyers that might say, oh, I can't try that on? No, I want to go somewhere that I can touch and feel it. >> Yeah, well, it's emerging still. I mean, retailers have a lot of data. I think they're trying to figure out where is it most useful. And one of the places where it is incredibly useful is in the backend with fraud management. So, after retailers were forced to put in chip cards as a payment form, what you started to see was more of the fraud shifting to eCommerce. I just had two credit cards that had to be shut off because of E-commerce fraud. But that is where you see the fraudsters going to. And what you see as a result of that is some innovators in that space technology companies really leveraging machine learning, AI, other advanced data techniques to identify fraudulent transactions and to better help retailers eliminate or reduce the percent of transactions that have to then be charged back. So, that's probably one of the most promising areas. There are others that are emerging. We're seeing more visual recognition technologies. House for instance, is excellent at that and Pinterest too. If there's part of an image you like you can click on it or you can tap it and see other images like that. And that's incredibly difficult. And it was even more difficult 10-15 years ago, but it's becoming easier. There's the voice element, voice to text or text to voice. I think that the best applications they're often in customer service, there are so many interactions that happen anywhere in a consumer facing world. It doesn't even have to be within retail. You can think about the complaints to the airline industry or to a bank. And a lot of it falls into a black hole. You always hear that oh, This call may be recorded, but it is really difficult to go back and transcribe that. And to really synthesize that into major themes. And what ML in particular can do is to basically pull out those themes, it can automate all of that, and can give insights as to what you could be doing, what you should be doing, what are the opportunities that you may not have even known existed. So there are definitely emerging places. I mean even a visual recognition, so we talked about House and Pinterest. Another great example is the computer vision that you have in the Amazon Go stores. And there's a robot that the Wal Mart stores are now testing to go find if there are gaps in the inventory that need to be filled. Or if something is running low or out of stock. So there are definitely some interesting applications, but it's still early days for sure. >> So last question, we've got to wrap here, but, we're in April 2018, what are some of the, your top three recommendations for merchants, as they prepare for say Black Friday coming up in what, six or eight months. What are you top three recommendations for merchants to be successful and be able to facilitate a seamless online offline experience? >> Well, we always have kind of imbalances between supply and demand, and that's where I do think things like third party sellers, third party marketplaces are huge. So to be able to leverage that is certainly one opportunity. Another is to think creatively about promotions. In Japan they have these promotions called Fukubukuro promotions, and it's basically like grab bags of like all the left over inventory. But then they basically put it into mystery bags where you can buy it for half off. And consumers line up around the block at stores to go buy these grab bags. Because they also have also like a gamified approach where, you know, one of out 10 of the bags will have like an Ipad or some really high value item. So people really like these things, and they have trading parties. So just new ways of having promotions beyond just the typical door busters that retailers think about. And then kind of third I think is just try to pace out the demand. One of the big issues in E-commerce has been just the burst in demand that always happen in December. And that creates a lot of problems from the standpoint of actually shipping the orders. So the more that you can pull those transaction forward into November, the better off you are from a fulfillment and supply chain standpoint. >> Alright Sucharita thank you so much for stopping by theCUBE >> Thanks Lisa >> And sharing your insights on the trends and what's going on in the commerce and E-commerce space. Really enjoy talking with you. >> Nice to talk to you too. >> We want to thank you for watching. You're watching theCUBE live from Magento Imagine 2018, I'm Lisa Martin. Stick around, I'll be back with my next guest after a short break. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Narrator: Live from the Wynn Hotel in Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Magento Imagine 2018. Brought to you by Magento. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's continuing coverage of Magento Imagine 2018 from Las Vegas. I'm Lisa Martin, joined by Anita Andrews, the director of analytical services at Magento. Anita, welcome to theCUBE. >> Hi, Lisa. How are you? (laughs) >> Very good, excited to be here. This is a really interesting topic, commerce. We talk a lot on theCUBE about digital transformation in so many different contexts. But really, it seems that commerce is becoming the center of gravity for digital transformation. Data is everywhere. There's so much opportunity for B to B organizations, B to C organizations, to leverage that data to drive new revenue streams, et cetera. Talk to us about what Magento is doing with respect to BI and how you're enabling your customers to use it to better their businesses. >> Yeah, so, I'm so glad that you sort of asked this question because we're doing a lot of conversations at this Imagine as opposed to previous ones around BI, around analytics, the role of data. And it's because I think we have a conversation and a story to tell around this. It's actually been long in the making. So, what we've learned after working with thousands of clients, from the basics of KPIs and reporting all the way up to machine learning, is that the approach to how do you launch this aspect of the business, really, that powers the entire business, is so important. Because otherwise, you end up with a crazy Christmas tree of solutions and no one really is moving the KPIs of the business forward using data. So, what we are doing is, we've created an infrastructure that allows all kinds of data. Whatever data that you have. It could be in a spreadsheet or it could be an automated feed. To come together into the platform to cleanse it, because everybody has dirty data, cleanse it, sort of model it for your use, and then be able to leverage it for, of course, KPIs reporting, but also run advanced data science on it, and then use that to power the commerce. And not just cross-sales and up-sales on the website, that's a story everybody wants to do and many aren't even doing yet, but also for things like email marketing, for online advertising, for vendor management, for inventory management. I mean, there's so many use cases. So, it's really about bringing the data together into a single place and then using that all throughout the organization. >> So, this is the eighth Magento Imagine. >> Anita: It's my first! (laughs) >> Mine too, ours too, at theCUBE! But you were saying that this is, the topic of business intelligence, is relatively new. Tell us, the role of data, you mentioned a number of use cases and multiple lines of business in an organization that can benefit from this. Why is this something that you think now is becoming so critical when 'big data' as a term has been around for quite some time? >> For a long time, and data has been around for a long term, right, everybody has spreadsheets from years back. I don't think it's that the role of data is becoming more important, per se, but I think that a lot of businesses have tried a lot of things and had sort of spotty successes, so online marketing is a lot better now with data. Right, I mean, absolutely. But this notion that there's these silos across the organization and the whole, I'm sure you guys have talked about this either today or yesterday, the whole customer-centric view that is becoming so vital to the business >> It's essential. online, offline, multi-channel. Well, the only way you do that is if you don't have silos. Right, and so this question of how do we bring all of this together and create the customer-centric view, and, by the way, you know, apply AI to many aspects of the customer experience, it can only happen if we sort of elevate the usage, the consolidation, all of that, and so I think that's a bigger problem. It's easy to kind of have a team work with data on its own. It's much more, it requires a lot more thought to kind of bring it all together and also get going, right? This isn't a a four-year plan to get there. You need to get going soon. >> Exactly, or you risk falling behind and not being able to catch up. So, let's talk about this modern stack. >> Anita: Yeah. >> This modern technology stack to capitalize on the e-commerce opportunities. Give us an example of a B to B organization, what they have existing when Magento comes and how they're able to use your technology across that spectrum of BI. >> Sure, so, most B to B organizations have data. Let's list some common sources of that data, right. So, first of all, they're going to have, most likely, Salesforce or some other sort of CRM database. They're going to have some sort of vendor database, right, either using a third-party tool or something they've home-grown. So often, something they've home-grown. They certainly have online marketing data, they've got transactional data, all of these different things that need to come together. So, in that way, they can leverage the MBI product, Magento Business Intelligence, to bring those data sources in together. Also, they can bring in their spreadsheets or whatever. But you use MBI to bring it together and then there's a level within that stack, the transformation layer, that allows you to sort of edit that data, right. I mean, back to the point of dirty data, edit it so that it's clean. So, you know that, well, in March we were wrongly charging shipping or something like that. Whatever the issues were, cleansing. And then start to report on that within MBI and create whatever sort of analytics you need to. But then you can also incorporate machine learning algorithms to start doing things like predictive analytics. So, start doing this vendor management, et cetera and then use that to, actually, MBI comes with some pre-built B to B dashboards, which is a thing that we just launched in the past year, which is also proving very useful. I mean, businesses have never seen this sort of total view of their customers, their data. And then you take, sort of, some of the learning and some of the information that's in the MBI and then use that to configure personalization Magento 2 commerce or, again, some of these other channels which might be email marketing, which might be, you know, call center scripting. I mean, whatever it is, that's kind of how it comes together. The MBI stack powering Magento 2, whether it's cloud or enterprise, and then other third-party tools that make sense to the customer as well. >> So, the customer has an existing POS system or an ERP system or a web store. Is it a simple integration process? How do they go about integrating that with, especially with, an accent group is coming on later today that has a hundred thousand skews and three thousand products. >> Yeah, so, the aim and the aspiration of MBI is to be able to take any data source, right. So, there's a bunch of data sources for which we have automated integrations. Literally, you put in your credentials and it starts flowing right away. Another option is that you have an API that you can use to import data in, so, if you've got the resources to leverage that, that's an option. Sometimes, if we don't have an automated integration, a lot of third-party data sources now will allow you to put them in a MySQL database or something like that. You can just just connect that directly to MBI, as well. And finally, we're very much looking at, from a product standpoint, how do we leverage the incredible community we have around Magento to develop more integrations, right. Because we cannot keep pace with the thousands and thousands of data sources that are launching every day. So, this community can and they are so close to what customers need to be able to bring in from a data perspective, so, we're also exploring that possibility as well, which would completely change the game. >> Yeah, you've got a very active developer community of, what, three hundred thousand developers? >> Yeah, it's something phenomenal like that. >> Lisa: That is phenomenal. >> Yes. >> When we look at the spectrum of analytics and we get towards the, whichever end it is, the right side, the left side, looking at advanced analytics. >> Anita: Yes. >> Artificial intelligence, for example, can you give us an example of a Magento customer that's being able to utilize artificial intelligence to drive new revenue streams or reduce attrition. Anything that comes to mind that's a really strong hallmark of your capabilities? >> Yeah, so, one of the ones that I love the most is around inventory management. And that applies to B to B and B to C, right. So, one of the things that we're starting to see a lot of traction and results around is advanced analytics and machine learning that's predicting how much inventory you have. So, inventory is money. You don't have enough, you're going to lose your customers. If you have too much, that's dollars sitting on the shelf, right, or accounts payable to your vendors, I mean, whatever it is. So, it is so, traditionally, it's been very hard to predict what you're going to need and when you're going to need it. So, there is now capability within MBI that you can feed into your vendor management or other sorts of merchandising management systems wherein you can sort of say, if you have a two week lead time to be able to get new inventory, then it can predict which of your skews, which of your products, are going to be running out before that two weeks end. And what we've seen with customers that are leveraging that is incredible increase in customer satisfaction rates because that sort of mismatch of, I thought I was going to get this but no, I'm not getting this, is going down. But they're also able to not even have to say it's out of stock on the site, which is a such a disappointing factor. So, improvement in conversion rates and customer satisfaction rates and on the flip side, there's another aspect of that functionality that says, well, do you have more inventory than, let's say, you know, two months' worth? And that two months piece is configurable per business, because if you're an outdoor goods store, two months in March for winter stuff is too late, right? You need to get rid of that now. But at the start of winter, four months might be great. So, all of that is totally configurable to be customized to that business, who knows the particulars of their business so well. And so, what we're seeing there is the, sort of, cost of goods that are being sent into after-market channels or sale or discount channels, is going down dramatically. And that's just a great case that I love because it's applicable, like I said, to B to B and B to C. >> So, on a B to B front, we have a lot of businesses behind us here. >> Anita: Yeah. >> As consumers, we expect to be able to get whatever we want whenever we want. Amazon just announced a hundred million Amazon Prime subscribers >> That's a lot of people. And people will not buy something if it's not available on Amazon Prime. We just think, what? We have to wait a week? >> Must not be a thing. (laughs) >> Exactly, exactly. But also something that the gentleman that was on main stage this morning from Amazon said, that about half of what's purchased on Amazon isn't sold by Amazon. >> Anita: Yeah. >> So, in the consumer space, we have this bar set very, very high. As business buyers, business buyers are consumers in their daily lives, as well. >> Anita: Yeah. I wonder, what are some of the trends that you're seeing on the B to B side that are maybe spilling over or being influenced by the consumer side and how is Magento helping businesses to be able to create these seamless experiences for businesses to transact in a high-velocity, low-touch model? >> Yeah, that's a really good question. You and I were talking before we got started here about how the buyers in a B to B environment, they're not a corporation. They're individuals. They're humans that actually are bringing their B to C personal experiences and expectations into their workplace. I mean, they don't turn into another person, right. They're maybe harder for procurement, you know, channels and all of that, but they're bringing the same expectations into it. So, frankly, you know, while Magento has sort of a B to B focused technology commerce platform, as well, that we've launched and is growing, as does MBI, you know, that will be a growing aspect, a particularization of the Magento platform. On the flip side, what we're also doing is saying they're not different and we're setting high standards for our B to B customers to say, it may be more challenging for you to act like a B to C customer, but that doesn't mean you get to, it may be hard for you to act like a B to C business, but that doesn't mean you get to not act like one, right, because the expectations are there. So, things like, whether it's as simple as what is order management, right, what is order tracking, what are ship and delivery timelines look like? Do I have various payment mechanisms, right? Consumers expect that, right, and those are often geographically dictated. Well, in the business environment, there may be other sort of procurement things to be thoughtful of. So, the conversation we're having, whether it's from a services standpoint or from a technology and product standpoint is have the same standards. And that is, frankly, in the conversations that I have day to day, I get a lot of but buts. You know, but, that's hard for us. Yeah, but so? Right, so let's figure this out. And, of course, you have to prioritize and all of that, you're not going to sort of turn from one end to the other overnight, but really, the message that we are seeing successful B to B customers hear and act upon is meet those consumer expectations and you'll knock it out of the park. >> Lisa: And who doesn't want to do that? >> Right. >> So, let's kind of turn the tides here. Let's look at Magento and how you're using your own technologies. How are you using analytics across that spectrum to really change the entire model? For example, you know, we talked about before we went on, as well, marketing. I'm a marketer. Marketing is a science now because marketers and every line of business has the ability to leverage data to drive many new opportunities. Talk to us about, internally, how you guys are using this spectrum of analytics >> Yeah. to continue to expand in B to B and B to C. >> Yeah, so, I'm going to give you a couple of different use cases, but this will be interesting because we're sort of opening up the kimono here about what goes on, you know, in our offices. So, yesterday, I actually heard our head of development, Ramadass, talk about a use case for using Magento BI within his organization. All of his different many development teams were tracking their tickets and numbers and all of that in various different ways and he sort of came in and said, well, this isn't going to work. I can't measure my organization. And he decided to deploy Magento BI across the whole thing. That wasn't easy, he said it wasn't smooth, but he started with one group who sort of took to it, and then once the benefit started to be seen, started to deploy across all the organization and he said, you know, he had the foresight and patience to stick with it and now he's got, you know, consistent view of what's going on there in the organization. Another angle that we use it from is, for example, with Mangento BI, there's certainly, it's different than implementing Magento Commerce, where, well, maybe it's not that different, but one aspect that I think is different is you do a lot of work to launch Magento Commerce and then, yes, you can expand your use a bit. MBI is pretty quick to get going, but how much you're using it throughout your organization or even within the product takes time. So, we've leveraged our predictive analytics to understand, to track those customer behaviors, and understand, well, when might be a good time to talk to them about, you know, machine learning? When might be a good time to talk to them about, you know, inventory management, whatever those topics are. But we're looking at those customer attributes, how far along are they in MBI, to run our online marketing campaigns, but even our personal marketing campaigns. We're not so big that we can't call up in our own customer success experiences and say, we think you're in a good place where you might want to think about doing this, as well. And then a third place is around customer support, so, a couple years ago, we used the product to figure out how much time were we spending on our customers, right? And there's a notion of a rate per hour. Are we allocating our time properly? It's very easy for the squeaky wheel to get the most attention. Is that the right thing for the business? So, these are the ways that we've used it internally. We're B to B, right? (laughs) >> Right! Would it be fair to say that you're democratizing data within Magento? >> Yes, everybody, I can at least speak to it on the MBI side and I know this is true in development, et cetera, everybody has access to the data. And that's kind of where, watching, you know, an individual contributor take that and run with it and sometimes it's a little bit too eager for me, and then I have to kind of dial it back, and we can't make all those changes today, but it is so impressive to see what they think about asking, what questions they think about asking of the business and that they feel like will solve an actual problem. >> So, kind of allowing innovation. Well, Anita, thank you so much for taking some time >> Yeah, thank you. to stop by theCUBE. We wish you the best of luck in your general session presentation this afternoon and we look forward to hearing from some of your customers and some of your leaders on the program later today. >> Great, thank you, Lisa. >> We want to thank you for watching theCUBE. We are live in Las Vegas at Magento Imagine 2018. Stick around, I'm Lisa Martin. We'll be back with our next guest after a short break. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Narrator: Live from the Wynn hotel in Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Magento Imagine, 2018. Brought to you by Magento. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Magento Imagine 2018 from the Wynn, Las Vegas. I'm Lisa Martin, and I'm excited to be joined by some award finalists of the Magento Imagine Experience Awards. We have Dr. Markus Reheis, the chief marketing officer at Gabor Shoes, and Stefan Willkommer, the CEO of TechDivision, a systems integrator. Hi guys, welcome to theCUBE. >> Hi. >> Hi, nice to meet you. >> Great to have you guys here. Congratulations on being an award finalist for the best sales channel growth. We're going to talk about that in a second, but Gabor Shoes. Talk to us about what Gabor does, where you guys are located, and then we'll talk about how you're transforming the shoe space with e-Commerce. >> Gabor is a manufacturer of shoes, ladies shoes only. Our headquarters in Germany, and our main markets are in Germany and central Europe, but we do also export to 60 countries, more than 60 countries worldwide, to China, to Korea, also to the United States a little. >> Lucky me. So your customers are the retailers themselves. How many different brands do you have, different SKUs, different products? I imagine it's massive numbers. >> Yes, our main product is ladies shoes, as I said, we have several brands for the ladies shoes, Gabor, Rollingsoft for the sports shoes type, but we also offer bags, handbags, and socks and tights, but the most important is the ladies shoes for us. >> So many, many hundreds of thousands of SKUs, lots of different locations. You've been the chief marketing officer there for quite a long time. Talk to us about the opportunity that you saw, that you could give to your retailers by expanding this physical in-store shopping experience into the online world. >> Yes, we have started our online business quite late. We long time hesitated to set up our own online shop toward the end user, because it was always our philosophy that we want to be partners of our retailers. We did not want to compete with them by opening an online shop. So it was clear for us that when we start our online business, we want to have our retailers as partners on our side. And that's why we developed this Omnichannel concept that integrates the retailers. >> Omnichannel is a word that we hear a lot at events like this. It's critical for a seamless customer experience. We were talking before we went live is we're all consumers, everyday lives, we pick up a tablet or a mobile phone and we expect to be able to find whatever we want at a simple click. What was the process like of becoming partners with your retailers? Was it an obvious sell to them, that they have revenue-generating opportunities, the opportunities to reach many more customers in different regions? Or was it more of a challenging conversation to convince them? >> Yeah, let me explain a little bit about the situation. We do distribute via traditional classic brick and mortar retailers primarily. There are around 5,000 companies worldwide that buy shoes from Gabor. They have around 20,000 stores. But the situation is that there is quite a mixed structure of retailers. Many of them are small businesses, family owned businesses, and they do not have the chance to have an own online presence that is competitive. So they have to focus on their brick and mortar business. But nowadays, in Germany, we have around 30% of all shoes that are bought online, and this brings many of our customers into trouble. So it was our idea to open this marketplace to let the traditional retailer participate at the online business. >> So talk to us about, from a technology perspective, the modern technology that you needed to be able to deliver this. So, Stefan, talk to us about how TechDivision, as a long-time partner of Magento, is helping in working with Gabor shoes to enable this Omnichannel experience. >> First of all, the marketplace looks like a simple online shop. So for the end consumer, it looks like any other online shop where you simply buy just the shoes. In the background, there are a lot of processes going on, so like we have to allocate orders to stores, to inventory locations, that means the retailer, and we have to look where the inventory is. We don't want to do a lot of order splitting, of course, because we don't want to ship a lot of different packages, and you need a sophisticated solution who is capable of doing exactly that, because I mean there are a lot of processes, and of course algorithms that around, what do you need, or what do you have to have in place that you can do that like that. And Magento was offering, with the order management, exactly great product to delivering that. So this is the foundation for the whole concept, and makes it able for us, and for Gabor, to integrate the retailers really smooth. >> So how many retailers are integrated currently? >> We have started the concept just a few months ago. It was surprising that so many retailers contacted us and said, I want to be part of that system. So we have around 100 retailers with around 400 stores that still have to be connected. Currently we have 40 stores connected with the system. >> So you had retailers that were proactively reaching out to you, saying, we want to get in on this? >> Yeah. >> Wow, that must have been pretty exciting. And Stefan, you mentioned the word simple. And that's something, as buyers, we want a simple, clean experience as the consumer, but also for the retailer, right, and the supplier. Talk to us about how you're leveraging, You mentioned the Magento management software, to give your retailers this complete visibility of their inventory so that they can fulfill through the right channels. >> Yeah, first of all it is in the German market, in the German retail shoe market, a little bit simpler, maybe than in other countries. There is a couple of POS solutions, there are not too many, and we build a basic interface so they can really easily attach their inventory to our order management, or the order management of Gabor, and then we are able to utilize the different inventory, or the different stocks. That is pretty simple. There are a lot of other processes which are not really technical, it's more about contracting, so more the retailers, there is of course some training, you have to train the people, the staff, because they have to use the platform, and that way they see, okay, an order is coming in, what they have to do now, they have to create the pick list, they have to pick the stuff, pack the stuff, ship the stuff, print the label out, putting the documents in and everything, so you have to train the people and the simplicity is because they just need a simple web browser to do that. So either a tablet or a PC, that's all what they need. They don't need any other software. They don't need really other devices. Basically most of the retail stores already have these kind of devices in store. >> So they can utilize an existing POS system, or maybe an ERP system ... >> Yes. >> instead of having to replace things. So from an integration perspective, it sounds like it's a fairly... >> Yeah, they don't have to invest really money, they just have to, I mean, bring the inventory, and that can be through a flat file, or through a web service, so both possibilities are there. Right now they just need a web browser connected to the internet, that's all. >> Sounds so simple. >> Yeah, it is. >> So let's talk about, we hear the term digital transformation used everywhere, and it means different things to different organizations, depending on where they are in that digital transformation journey. When we look at commerce, commerce is becoming a center of gravity for digital transformation. Markus, talk to us about the transformation that Gabor has undergone. Where are you on this digital transformation journey? >> Still, we are really right on the beginning. We have installed, of course, digital tools to make the sales process easier, but we always thought about B2B processes. For example, we have installed a B2B online shop maybe 10 or 12 years ago, so that's an existing thing. The new thing for us is that we go towards the end user. I have a number for you. We produce around 9 million pairs of shoes every year, and still the amount what we directly sell to the end user is a very, very small amount. So we are at the beginning of this process, but we have ambitious goals, and we want to grow in the future. We started our marketplace concept in Germany, but we want to roll it out to other European countries, maybe to countries outside Europe, so there's a lot to do, a lot of opportunities for us in the coming years. >> So let's talk about the rest of 2018. Here we are in April. You're going to be adding many more retailers. What are some of the things from a technology perspective that TechDivision is going to be able to do with you, and maybe Magento, to start finding the other 8 million in opportunities that you just mentioned? >> In the end, it's not just a thing of the online store, but of course it's a thing of online marketing, so this has to be increased, definitely. Yeah, we still have a lot of things to do, onboarding the retailers, and this again is not just a technical thing, it's a lot of, Stefan already told you, it's more to do with training, and explaining the processes, that costs a lot of time. So it goes step by step, but we make good progress there. >> So last question, Stefan, for you- as the chief marketing officer, I'm a marketer myself, tell me about, from a digital marketing perspective, as consumers, and really, in the B2B space, Magento had a study on their website that said 93% of B2B buyers want to purchase online, right? So we're seeing that trend as consumerization into the business space. From a marketing perspective, there's a lot of shifting going on there, too. Big data has been a big enabler of marketing becoming a science. And being able to demonstrate to the business and influence business there. Tell me a little bit about, in the last minute or so, how are you leveraging big data and analytics, maybe even through Magento, to redefine marketing that you're doing at Gabor? >> Yeah, again, big data can help us to build customer groups, to send them individual offerings. That's a good thing about the digital business, when we have a satisfied customer, of course we can always, again, send them products, product offerings, but these offerings have to be individual, they have to be relevant for the end user. That's why artificial intelligence, for example, can help us. >> Maybe to add something, we already started using Magento BI, for example. So we are using that full commerce suite of Magento right now. We are using the areas to measuring how fast the shipment is done through a retail stores, and then adjusting the allocation to that measurement. So if a retailer is shipping faster, it's getting more likely that he's getting an order allocated next time, when an allocation run is taking place. So we are using this to get a better end user, consumer experience, by having the products earlier, or more frequent ship. >> Right. So many benefits for the businesses, the retailers, maybe repeat sales, they've got this instant purchase capability that Magento released recently, one click, get things even faster, reducing checkout time, all the things that drive up repeat business. But also the personalization front is going to be key to be able to deliver, as you said, Markus, the relevance offers that we all want. >> Exactly. The great benefit of this marketplace concept is that since we have connected the different stocks of our retailers, we can offer much more product by this way than we could do it alone. So the offering of our 3,000 styles per season gets nearly unlimited to the end user. >> Limitless. We talk about limitless commerce. Well, gentlemen, thank you so much for stopping by and having a chat with me today. We wish you good luck on the award nomination. I hear those are being given out tonight, so best of luck, and we hope to see you again on theCUBE soon. >> Thank you. >> Thanks a lot. >> We want to thank you for watching theCUBE, live from Las Vegas at Magento Imagine 2018. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE. Stick around, we'll be right back with our next guest. (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, our live coverage of Magento Imagine 2018. This is an awesome event, 3,000 attendees. I'm Lisa Martin with John Furrier, we're going to be here all day. We're really stoked to have our next guest Melissa Ben-Ishay who is the Chief Product Officer and President of Baked by Melissa. Cupcakes, I love them. Melissa, your drive and your passion during your keynote was electric. Welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you, thank you so much for having me. So you have this awesome story that I think is going to inspire many, many, many more people than it probably already has. You were fired from a job about 10 years ago and it was the best thing ever because it led to the genesis of not only Baked by Melissa, but you following your passion and living your dreams. Tell us a little bit about that and how you turned this idea into a business and are using technology to reach hundreds of thousands if not millions of people. >> Sure, so I mean nobody wants to be fired and it definitely sucked when it happened, but I wasn't passionate about the work I was doing and that's ultimately why I was fired. I was not good at the job. And if I wasn't I would have never had the opportunity to start a company like Baked by Melissa and be so passionate about what I do everyday. So, I took that crappy day, I went home, I baked four batches of cupcakes, sent them into work with my best friend's little sister. An owner of a PR firm loved them, put me in touch with her caterer who brought me in for a tasting and I started doing events as Melissa of Baked by Melissa with this high-end caterer in Manhattan less than a week after I was fired from my job and what I've learned is that it's a certain attitude and mindset. It's not rocket science. If you see every challenge as an opportunity and you surround yourself with people who have skills that you don't and you work your butt off, then you can truly do anything. And the Baked by Melissa story, is just the perfect example of that. >> What about the founder's story, you really had to hustle you can tell by the keynote, being a founder myself, I know there's a rollercoaster of emotions. >> Lisa: Sure. >> But you kind of really got to get the nose to the grindstone, hit the pavement. Tell about the key moments in the founding because you really had to hustle it. >> Lisa: Yeah. >> I think that's really the key. >> Sure it is, and I knew that I had the opportunity to do what I love every day, so I was obsessed with cupcakes while I was working in advertising I would eat like two giant cupcakes a day because they were my favorite food. And I baked cupcakes, I baked my tie-dye cupcakes for everyone and anyone, if it was your birthday and I loved you, I baked you tie-dye cupcakes. It was a hobby. So, when I met this caterer for a tasting, I saw it as a great opportunity. One that would allow me to, potentially, do what I love every single day and I knew in my head like I remember like talking to myself, "Melissa, you have the chance to do what you love every day, you need to everything you possibly can to achieve this goal, because you cannot live a life of could have, would have, should have." >> John: What was the >> And that's me today. >> Melissa, what was the moment when you said, "Damn, I could do this, this is a business"? Was it, what was that moment? Talk about that moment. >> So we founded the company about 10 years ago. I'm just starting to feel like "Damn, I can do this." like we are in such a good place right now. We have such an unbelievable team of like-minded, hard-working, passionate people who get stuff done. And we can do anything. And we built this team and this foundation and just wait to see what's next. We're great. >> I love it. >> But it took a long time to really get that confidence. And by surrounding myself with people who love me and support me, they gave me confidence I needed when I didn't have it myself. >> So, 10 years later, nearly, you have 14 stores. You are available on your website, on Amazon, you're enabling people all over, at least the country, for sure to buy these cupcakes. I'm going to place an order later today, because I'm already, I love cupcakes too. >> Melissa: Thank you. >> So, tell us about, from a commerce standpoint, we're at Magento Imagine 2018. You guys have been using Magento for a few years now. How is this enabling you to reach, how did it, we'll say allow you to kind of connect your retail shops in the New York area with the greater country and those of us, you know, on the West Coast that can >> Sure. >> Now buy your products. >> We've really focused on our multi-channel distribution, and I think it's a great opportunity to touch multiple people at different points. Our goal is to keep the messaging very consistent, whether you walk into one of our retail locations and make a purchase over the counter or go to BakedbyMelissa.com and order it for shipping or even just interact with our social media pages. The consistency in messaging and brand is our top most priority. And then, you know, we have, we do, we have an unbelievable product. We have this great brand that I happen to be the face of and I love to represent. So we have this like winning kind of equation for a platform like Magento and just all the opportunity we have today, technologically to reach more people. And that's what's so exciting. As I'm walking around this area and seeing all of these new technologies and solutions and ways to get our messaging to more people, it's just so exciting. And my wheels are spinning, it's like, okay so now how can I use this new ability to do this to achieve our goal of selling 100 million in cupcakes in 2020? >> I mean the big question always is, is like the tech used to be really complicated now it's got to be easier. You don't want to spend your time thinking about what tech you got to buy. Really, I mean, >> Melissa: Sure it's again, >> You've been successful just by killing it on the product side. >> Totally and I thank God I have an unbelievable team of people and like my tech team are the people who oversee, the person who oversees our website is absolutely amazing. She is the definition of get shit done and always learning and I've learned through her at this conference. So, you know, putting people in the positions who are the best people for those roles so they can focus on their strengths and then I can, in turn, focus on my strengths. >> John: Yeah. >> And you know being somewhere like here allows me to think big picture about our technologies and Magento and what we can do more. >> Look, take a minute to talk about how many stores you have, where the locations are, the website, how people get in touch with you, locations. You say you ship around the country, just give a quick plug on what's going on with the site, the locations. >> Sure, well we have 14 retail location. We offer free pick up and free delivery in Manhattan at our store locations. We ship our product nationwide, a big chunk of our business is e-com and we're focusing on growing that business because it is a great opportunity to reach people where we don't have brick and mortar an we're going to continue to expand our retail footprint in the next year and a half. So, we're, it's very exciting. >> How do you ship cupcakes? I always, I just drive back from the store and my kids complain, "Dad, you shouldn't put them in the backseat" you know, "they tilted" or I mean, is there a packaging thing? I mean >> Melissa: Yeah, of course. >> We're very solution oriented and innovative at Baked by Melissa, we actually started started shipping our products in April of 2010, so at the time, we only had two retail locations >> John: Yeah. >> and we were shipping our product nationwide. What we did is we designed a, like a package, that keeps the product perfectly fresh >> John: Nice. >> and perfectly safe in transit and it allows us to get the same quality of product if not even better to people all across the country. >> So talk to us about social media. I was telling you over the weekend, I, when I found out I was going to talk to someone who makes cupcakes, I love cupcakes so much, I was so excited, I tweeted you and then on Instagram probably half an hour later saw some information from you guys. Talk to us, not only about how you're using social media to reach so many more people, but also the Side with Love Project and how that is taking storm in social media. >> So, Side with Love is a very, very special opportunity for us where we were touched by something our President said that wasn't positive and it did not represent who we are as a company and we, you know, kind of saw it as, you know, we needed to do something about it, I guess is the best way to say it, we weren't okay with what was happening and we decided that we wanted to do something to inspire people to do random acts of kindness for people. So we said, you know what, we're going to give away 150 thousand cupcakes, we're going to side with love and we're going to inspire people to send 25 cupcakes for free anywhere in the country to anyone they want completely on us. So, we did that, we partnered with Something Digital whose amazing and they were geniuses and said, "You should probably put a queue on your website so it doesn't crash, we did that, we had 60,000 people in line to purchase these cupcakes and it's who we are, Right? We saw something happening in the world and we responded. And we, we, we made life sweeter for a lot of people. And that's what we do in everything, we saw a challenge and we made it an opportunity to just show people who we are and show them that no matter what's happening in the White House or in the world, you are you, and you're responsible for who you are and you can do whatever you want. >> What's the one thing, or two things that you can talk about as in an entrepreneur journey that surprised you that you were like, "Wow, that really happened, we overcame it." There's always those moments that you have to break through glass or really fight hard or really overcome adversity? >> Yeah, absolutely, so I would say that the biggest thing I've learned is emotional control, and how important it is not to communicate when you're feeling emotional and when you have a crappy day, it's not the end of the world, you're going to wake up the following day and the sun will shine, like God willing, so far, so good. So, I had a lot of moments where I felt like the world was going to end and I was so upset I was in business with my family. Like, it wasn't easy, but I woke up the next day and I always had these conversations with my dad where he kind of enforced how important like pressure makes a diamond a diamond, right? So, having a lot of those experiences definitely gave me the strength that I have today to know that it's never the end of the world. That it's those challenging situations that make you who you are. They make you stronger and I also learned that it's not rocket science. It's a basic attitude towards life that helps you succeed in anything you do. Whether it's business or raising a family or whatever your goals are, be positive, see every challenge as an opportunity. Surround yourself with people who support you. Quality not quantity. The world is your oyster and you can do anything if you're willing to work at it. >> I hear a book deal coming. (laughing) >> So inspiring. So, >> Thank you. >> You mentioned a really big lofty goal. Can you repeat that again with the number? >> Our goal is to sell 100 million cupcakes in 2020. >> In 20, by 2020. So here we are 2018 in April, you're 14 stores. People can buy it through your website, through Amazon, your engaging through social media. You have this huge goal that is around the corner. What are you going to be doing the rest of the year, and this year to be setting the business up to achieve that? >> Well everything that we do, we go back to the is that in line with selling 100 million cupcakes in 2020, and that's kind of how we choose because focus is essential as you grow a company there are so many opportunities. How do you decide to focus on? Is that going to help us >> John: Yeah. >> to get to 100 million cupcakes? We're focusing on growing our e-commerce business and it's growing, and it's very exciting. We're focusing on our multi-channel distribution and making sure the brand is consistent and we're opening additional retail locations. That does affect our e-com. We're going to open in new markets and we're going to reach new people who have never heard of us before, and we're going to get there. >> John: Melissa, I'm so impressed with you. Thanks for coming on, but I want to ask you the brand question because you're the Chief Product Officer, you got to come up with the new ideas and you got to stay fresh >> Melissa: Sure. you know with the brand. You got great loyalty. As you look out, as the trends go by, never fight fashion, right, you're a great mission based company, great values. As you look at the next, you know, trends, what's going on in the cupcake world, I mean, what do you look for? I mean, you must worry, you don't want to be out dated, you don't want to be yesterday's old, long in the tooth, as they say, but you want to be fresh. You got the fresh cupcakes. What's the, what's the trend in the cupcake world? What are you seeing? >> I don't know. How's that for you? I really don't like to focus on trends. We're not a trend and I think we didn't get to where we are by trying to compare ourselves to others, that's who I am, right? And I am Melissa, so I know that it's my job to bring you the most delicious product. We have a variety of flavors that are always changing. Everything is hand-made by people who love the product as much as I do, who I trained. >> John: So you're making the trends. >> Yeah, and you know what, I'm just staying true >> John: You got to come up with the new ideas. >> To who we are. Oh, and I always am, that's what I love to do. That's what got us here in the first place. >> Alright, craziest cupcake you made? >> So we're Kosher Certified and I did make a bacon cupcake and it wasn't good and it didn't have bacon in it, but whatever, (laughter) I guess that was the craziest one. >> Awesome. >> Awesome, well trendsetter, definitely. You're very inspiring. >> Thank you. We want to thank you so much for taking time to stop by and share with us what you're doing and how you're leveraging e-commerce technology to do it. But also this passion and setting trends. Melissa Ben-Ishay we want to thank you for joining us. >> Thank you so much for having me. >> And for John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE Live at Magento Imagine 2018. We're in Vegas, stick around John and I will be right back with our next guest after a short break. (tech music)

>> Narrator: Live from the Wynn Hotel in Las Vegas, it's the CUBE, covering Magento Imagine 2018, brought to you by Magento. (upbeat music) >> Hey, welcome to the CUBE, we are live in Las Vegas at the Wynn for Magento Imagine 2018. I'm Lisa Martin with my co-host John Furrier, and John, we have a really exciting day planned, talking all things digital commerce innovation. What are you most excited about? >> Well Magento's one of those companies that people know about, but it's the rocket ship in eCommerce, mainly because they've cracked the code on a few things, Lisa, that I'm really impressed with. One is, they've modernized eCommerce. ECommerce has been around 25 plus years on the web, with internet, but you think of it like the old Amazon, eBay, database world, but now we're living in a cloud world, cloud native's big, and there's still money to be made in retail as everything goes online. The digital transformation is impacting retail more than ever, smart phones is over 10 years old, so the question I've always asked is, where's the modern stack? So these guys have cracked the code on that. Two, and they're powering a lot of impressive sites, and the growth is phenomenal, but they have an ecosystem partner network that you can see behind us, if you can look at the camera you'll see hundreds of partners. So I mean, eCommerce obviously isn't going away, look at the growth of digital, digital natives are coming online, people want to do things digitally, but also it's changing the offline consumer experience. So there's a gap, traditionally, between online, offline, that's coming together. This is only going to get more acute as cloud, mobile, decentralized, block chain, there's still eCommerce in our future, and it's just never going away, and these guys have a really interesting approach, so we're excited to find out more here on what they're doing, their success, and how eCommerce is going to evolve. To me, that's the number one story is, can people leverage turnkey, scalable digital technologies to do business? >> So Magento has built their reputation on helping retailers to target online shoppers. You talked about online and offline, but they're now moving into the B2B space. As consumers, we expect, Amazon set the bar obviously very high, we expect to be able to get whatever we want as consumers, we're channel agnostic, we don't care, we just want to be able to find whatever we want when we want it, have it shipped to us, have it shipped to the store, and that is spilling over into the B2B space. And Magento's data suggests that 93% of B2B buyers want to be able to buy online, which not only changes the sales model, it changes the marketing model as well. >> I mean, they're taking the charge, that's the slogan here, and the thing that's interesting is that it used to be nice little buckets, B2C, business to consumer, B2B, business to business, but really it's a consumer to consumer role, and one of the things that you see right now social media is consumers are directly involved in either the content development process, or the engagement process. And if you look at no further than the side effects of what we see with Facebook, the downside of this whole data conversation is that the users want to be in control, and they are in control. So you're seeing almost a blurring of the lines between B2B, B2B, and C2C, where people need to tailor the eCommerce experience and have the data insights, either realtime, and or intelligent wise to know that the consumer is participating offline, they're online, but also peer to peer. The consumer to consumer relationship is to me going to be the cutting edge forward innovation area that a lot of these companies are going to innovate on because a lot of referrals are going on organically now as it's not so much audience anymore, because the audience is online digitally, it's about the network connection. So as people have a network connection with their friends, and you're seeing Facebook proving this, and LinkedIn, and others, is that you're going to start to see that data be very important. So I see a future where eCommerce stacks have to support consumer to consumer in any context, business to business, B2C, business to consumer, consumer to consumer, this is the holy grail, and whoever can scale that, again at large scale, while creating a money making opportunity, value creation opportunity for ecosystems is the winning formula. >> One of the themes that popped up during the keynote this morning with a number of folks that were on stage, including their CEO, and the Pittsburgh Steelers, was personalization. That's something that we expect as consumers, and as well as business buyers, we want to be able to have something where we know they know us, but we don't want to be marketed to. So Magento has done an interesting job and we're going to have a number of guests on the show today talking about how they're enabling this more personalized customized, you mentioned the word tailored, experience as a consumer to be able to get what I want when I want it, but also, through a now omnichannel. We're going to hear a lot about omnichannel today and how that's enabling new revenue streams, reduction in attrition, they talked about one of their newest features, Magento did, with the instant purchase. We want to be able to click once, buy it, and have it, something that means something to us, be able to buy it again, and again, and again. >> I mean this is the challenge right, in eCommerce, is table stakes are some of these features like instant click buying, having the kind of personalization, but the real angle to me is bringing in the personalization so that the consumer's involved. So what you see with the Steelers for instance, they do realtime shooting of the game and incorporate the fan experience into the eCommerce experience really seamlessly and in realtime, and so what you have is a change of a methodology. And so, eCommerce used to be a very one directional monologue, you'd put content out there, people browse and consume. Now you have a realtime interactivity piece, which changes the content production perspective, and the Steelers pointed that out. In the tech world, we used to call this agile programming, when you write software development. So you start to see the concept of agile come into eCommerce where, whether it's an entrepreneur, Melissa, baking goods, or a business, they want to focus on the business at hand, not provisioning technology. So you've got to have a partner like a Magento or someone who can build all that tech turnkey so that people can focus on the business at hand and that's agile. So if they decide to incorporate something really fast, you can't have this waterfall process, and that's the problem with the content market, and that is a legacy baggage of eCommerce, where hey, we built it, we ship it, but we got to go back and decide what to change, and we got to push it through the code base. You're provisioning technology, that is an old way of doing things, that's not ideal for the modern era. You need to be very agile, very scrum like, to use that term, and content people need that to be successful because the difference between realtime and having that right experience is a matter of seconds and or context specifics. So agile content, can't be waterfall. >> Exactly, agile content that's data driven. You mentioned data earlier, we're going to actually be talking with Anita Andrews, who's going to be talking about what Magento can facilitate and deliver their users with respect to BI, the Steelers talked about that, they actually see when the Steelers aren't doing well, they see a reduction in merchandise, merch that's actually purchased on site. So they have the data to be able to make the decisions to deliver this personalized content in a way that they can see, how can we adjust our sales structure to be able to capitalize on revenue opportunities. >> I mean responding to data is really critical, so the Steelers example is great. When they lose, there's no sales, 'cause everyone's kind of bummed out. When they win, they sell everything out. So you know, in sports world, which is that big part of Magento's base, managing the assets of running the franchise, for instance, becomes a real big thing. Whether it's food, or apparel, or any kind of fan experience, they can adjust either dynamic pricing, these are the things that the content owners want. They want to be able to say, hey, we can understand sentiment from the data, and then adjust the marketing mix and content mix based on what's going on in realtime. That's a game changer, and if you can do that on a form factor for web, mobility, and future formats, whether it's cryptocurrency, that is going to be to me the tell sign of who's innovating. >> And speaking of innovation, this is the eighth event that Magento, the eighth Imagine event, our first time here, but you mentioned their partner ecosystem, there's 1150 solutions and technology partners you can see quite a few of them behind us here, a lot of people are needing this type of technology to be able to better merge the online and offline worlds, across consumers, across businesses. We have some great guests here who are going to talk to us about how they're doing that, enabling multi-retail, enabling multi-channel, and really enabling this true globalization of commerce to allow businesses to go, we actually have a guy from Coca Cola who's going to be on today, talking about the project that they are, where they're personalizing the Coke bottles, it's such an interesting topic of discussion because it's very personal and very relatable, and I think. >> Marketing's always, market to the persona of one, but now you have a brand relationship that's online and offline, and this is changing how companies are building their assets. So an offline retail outlet, whether it's a mall or a superstore, or whatever, that can be configured in a way that's complementary to the online, and then having the merging of the data, and then having that relationship with the consumer. To me, omnichannel is a huge retail challenge, it's super important, because at the end of the day, do you want to have that insight into the customer, but also have the great experience, that's key. >> Exactly, so we're going to be talking with the Accent Group, who's an award nominee for their awards here, and they're going to be talking about how they are merging multiple brands, hundreds of thousands of SKUs to be able to facilitate, and also give them the insight that retailers need on inventory, giving them fulfillment options, there's so much positive business outcomes that can be generated from this. We talked about reducing attrition, getting us faster check outs, we want to have something that's very simple, very seamless, and as you pointed out, really interesting to understand, what is the modern technology stack that can facilitate that? >> Yeah, great user experience, retail intelligence is something I think that's going to be something that's fascinating, and again, it's all about scale and the technology stack, and taking that complexity away from the customer, because at the end of the day, the digital storefront is what people are going to be interfacing with on a primary basis, that's also very complementary to the offline. So I'm super excited, I'm totally pumped to get into it. >> Me too, well looking forward to hosting with you all day John, and again, we are live in Las Vegas at the Wynn at Magento Imagine 2018. I'm Lisa Martin with John Furrier, we're going to be here all day, stick around. We're going to be right back with our next guest. (upbeat music)

(clicking) >> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. It looks like they're letting the general session out. We're here at the Professional Business Women of California Conference; 6,000 women, about 5% men really talking about, it's amazing, the 28th year. I've never been to this show about how women can get more inclusive and diversity and taking, executing on steps to actually make it happen as somebody said in the key note. It's not a strategy problem, it's an execution problem. So, we've got a great story here and we're really excited to have CUBE alumni, Andrea Ward. She's now the CMO of Magento Commerce. Welcome back, Andrea. >> Thank you so much, it's great to be here and great to be at this conference. The buzz is amazing and I was here two years ago and it's grown so much, just in the two years. >> How many people were there, they say it's 6,000, now. >> I mean, it looks like it's about doubled. I don't know what the numbers were two years ago but the participation is amazing and it's such a great opportunity for local businesses to bring employees from their companies, have them have a chance just to talk and learn from such powerful women. So, it's been a really great conference. >> And, it's also a cross of so many kind of verticals if you will, because you know we go to a lot of tech conferences. This is more kind of a cross industry with banking and insurance and, you know, United Airlines we talked to earlier. And so, it's a much more diverse kind of set. >> Absolutely, I mean the women on the panels this morning spanned legal professions, government, entertainment, business, really diverse issue and it's fantastic that women are coming together to support each other to help make a difference. >> So last we saw you, I think we were on the street on Howard Street a couple years back which was pretty exciting as well, but now your new company, Magento Commerce. So, for people who aren't familiar with the company, give them kind of the four-one-one. >> Yeah great, well Magento Commerce is a leading commerce technology platform for mid-size businesses. We have recently separated from Ebay about 15 months ago and are now a privately held company and we power about a third of the world's commerce, believe it or not. >> That is amazing. Yeah. >> A third of the world's eCommerce. >> That's right. So, it's a fantastic company. We're growing and a part of that growth is absolutely growing a more diverse workforce and we've been putting into place some initiatives since last year. >> Yeah, part of the key note conversations were, obviously, that you need to put goals down on paper and you need to measure them and I think it was Bev Crair from Intel talked about, you know, doing it across all the pay grades. It's not just in engineering or just on the board or just the executive ranks, but really all the way across and it sounds like you guys are executing that to really help you just grow the company generically. >> Well, we're in a very lucky position in that we're experiencing growth and so that gives us room to really go out and look for amazing talent across the board. And so, we put a focus on diversity and inclusion and by doing that, we've increased the percentage of women in all roles across the company by 50% and that's since last June. So I think, you know, really just what you said earlier about execution and putting some numbers and goals against that can really make a difference. >> Right, and if you hadn't had those, that execution detail you probably couldn't have grown that fast because let's face it, it's hard to get good talent. If you're not including a broader base of talent, you're not going to be able to achieve your goals. >> Well, that's right and I think that some of that is, I don't know if you want to call it unconscious bias or unintentional, we're used to hiring people that look like us, have experience like us. And so, by encouraging that diversity, it really has made us expand the pool of applicants, make sure that we're not going for the easiest choice or the simplest choice but really considering a wide range of candidates to fill those positions. >> You know, I don't the birds of a feather conversation comes up enough, it's just easy to go with what you're familiar with. So whether it's unconscious or not, it's just easy, people are busy, you want to check the box and get off to your next task. So, you have to take a step back and consciously do the extra work, take the extra effort. >> Well, in the industry we support, the industries we support are going through digital transformation, I mean, commerce is key and central to digital transformation. And, transformation and change means that you have to consider other perspectives. You need to learn from new ideas and I think, you know, diversity plays a big part in that as well. So, I think bringing that into our own company because we're supporting that broader industry has been very important. >> Right. So, I want to take that opportunity to pivot on what you just said about in terms of the changing role of commerce. You know, I often think of like banks because in a bank, you know, your relationship was with your local branch; maybe you knew the banker, maybe you knew a couple of the tellers whatever, but you had a personal connection. Now, most people's engagement with the brands they interact with is electronic and via their phone and it's interesting that you say that. And, it's the commerce around those engagements, that the commerce is becoming the central point of gravity if you will and the relationship is spawning all from that. >> Well, I mean, personal connections are still very important and commerce I feel is like the moment where a conversation really turns into a relationship. So, it's important that those digital experiences, the customer experiences really make up the right connection with the brand. And so, that seamless interaction between what happens at the branch, for example in the financial example, on what you can do at home, that needs to be very cohesive. It needs to be trustworthy, it needs to be authentic and that means businesses need to create individual experiences that really reflect their brand. And, our company specifically has really helped businesses create those experiences, seamless experiences and translated them from digital to in-store or in the branch. I think the biggest change now is how that's starting to impact business-to-business relationships, I think. >> In what way? In the consumer world, we're used to that now right? We're all doing that in our everyday experiences. Now, we're starting to see that also come into a business-to-business relationship. So, just like the seamless conveniences that you have online in your day to day life, people want to see that in the workplace, too. And so, we're seeing the biggest change now in those types of business models. >> They're rocking in the background, if you can't hear them. >> Yeah! We are here. >> Yeah! You know, it's funny, I just saw, something come across the feed talking about that annoying business-to-business add in Instagram, but then aren't you glad you saw it? >> Yeah. >> So, it's interesting how, you know, the B to C norms, you know, continue to help define what's going on in the B to B space and we've seen it in Enterprise Software Applications and Cloud and the flexibility and speed of innovation. It just continues to really drive the business-to-business relationship. >> Yeah, and I think just like in the business-to-consumer world, it has started with content in business-to-business. But, now people want to move from just learning and knowledge to actually transacting which means that companies need to enable specialized price list, account management, things like that and that's starting to surface in the commerce world as well. So, we're really excited about that and we're going to be sharing some of that at our conference next week; Imagine, in Las Vegas. >> Okay yeah, it's amazing how fast. It was not that long ago, we were just trying to get the 360 view. Right? We were just trying to pull from all the various desperate systems to know who that customer was for a given system. Now, it's a segmentation to want, a very different challenge. >> Right, I mean it's that change from thinking about trying to attract your customer to come to your business to really bringing the business to the customer. I mean, I think that's what some of this digital technology is allowing us to do. We're going to them rather than trying to draw them in to come to us, if that makes sense. This idea of commerce coming to you, right? >> And, it's got to come to you with something that's relevant, that's topical, that's timely. >> That's easy to execute, that can mirror a real experience. I mean, you hear a lot of things about, things like virtual reality, artificial intelligence. I mean, all of that's just gimmicks unless you can actually think about how you make that real for your brand. So, for example, we have a customer in Mexico City who is selling eyewear, right. And so, everybody when they buy glasses, they want to try them on, so we need to help them give their customers that virtual experience. If they can't come into the store and try them on, we want to be able to let them try them on at home. So, that's a natural extension of the brand and a way to use virtual reality and I think businesses are still trying to figure that out. But, if those customers didn't have that experience, it'd be less likely that they actually would buy or, you know, make a commerce transaction. >> But, if I'm hearing you, instead of it really kind of being in a marketing effort that then it's completed with a transaction, you're kind of coming at that which you just described from the transaction first and this is really a supporting or an enabling activity. >> That's right, it all starts with the customer understanding what is going to help them make their decisions. Giving them experiences that feel seamless, giving them options. So, if they want to come in-store but see what's maybe available at another store for pick-up or if they want to come in-store and order online or if they want to order from home and then go into the store and pick it up. It's really about giving the customer the right options for them. >> Right. >> Another great story we had is, I mean, how many of us travel, I know you travel a lot. >> Right. >> I travel a ton. >> Especially, to Vegas. (chuckling) >> Especially, to Vegas! And, you know, my kids are always expecting something when I come home but who has time? So, you know, one of our partners worked with the Frankfurt Airport and created an application where on the way to the airport, you can go shopping at all of their stores in the airport and have your package waiting for you at the gate on the way to the plane. So now, you know, they've figured out what their customers want to do first by creating this great shopping experience at the airport. Now, they know people are running through the airport, how can we extend that shopping experience for them while they're sitting in the taxi (chuckling) on the way, have it waiting for them at the gate? And so, for me personally, working for a company that's helping customers to do those kinds of things has really been fun. >> Right, because they always have the liquor for ya ready to go at the gate but never the kids', you know, t-shirts or a little tchotchke or, I can remember running through Heathrow time and time again trying to find something quickly. >> Yeah, and now with two kids and a husband that all want something different, (laughing) you know, it makes it much easier for me. >> Alright, Andrea, well you've been doing this marketing thing for a long time. I'll give you the last word both on the conference and kind of, you know, as a marketer to see where we're going with A.I. and really the ability to actually segment to one. You know, how exciting is that for you? >> Yeah, I mean, it's fantastic. I think, you know, marketers want to create relationships with their brand and all of these tools are giving us better access, better chance to create that fantastic experience. So, it's a great time to be a marketer. (chuckling) And, it's a great time to be at this conference, too so. >> Alright. Thanks very much. >> Thanks for stopping by, Andrea Ward. I'm Jeff Frick, you're watching theCUBE from the Professional Business Women's Conference in San Francisco. Thanks for watching. (upbeat electronic music)

(upbeat music) >> Hey everyone. Welcome back to Las Vegas. The Cube is live. I can't say that enough. We are alive at AWS re:Invent 2021. Lisa Martin with Dave Nicholson. Hey Dave. >> Hey Lisa. >> Having a good day so far. >> So far, so good. >> We have an alumni back with us. We have about a hundred segments on the cube at AWS remit. We've got one of our original alumni back with us. Zaki Bajwa joins us the global head of partner solution engineers at Stripe. Zaki welcome back. >> Thank you, Lisa, thank you, Dave. Pleasure to be here. >> Lisa: Isn't it great to be back in person? >> Love it. Love it. Can't do a whiteboard virtually, you can, it's not the same. >> It's not the same and all those conversations I'm sure that you've had with partners and with customers the last couple of days that you just can't replicate that over zoom. >> Zaki: Exactly. >> So just for anyone who doesn't understand, AWS has a massive ecosystem of partners. So we'll get to talk about Stripe and AWS, but for anyone that doesn't know what Stripe is, give us the lowdown. You guys started 10 years ago. Talk to us about Stripe, the business strategy, what it's like today. >> Yeah, sure. So you guys know Stripe started 10 years ago by two brothers, John and Patrick Collison. And they've really focused on the developer and helping the developers accelerate digital commerce. Why? Cause the status quo at the time was one where a developer needed to, you know, build banking relationships with issuing banks, merchant banks, card networks, payment networks, tax liabilities, data compliance, and all of these manual processes that they had to deal with. So what Stripe aspires to do is build a complete commerce platform. Leveraging our integrated suite of products that is really allowing us to build what we call the global payments and treasury network. So if you think about the global payment and treasury network or what we call the G P T N it's meant to not only help abstract all of that complexity from a global payment infrastructure point of view, but also help move money in a simple and borderless and a programmable way just like we do in the internet. So that's the core essence of Stripe is to build this global payment treasury network to allow for money movement to happen in a simple and borderless manner. >> Simple and borderless two key things there. How has the business strategy evolved in the last 10 years and specifically in the last 20, 22 months? >> Yeah. Great question. So as you can imagine with COVID, you know, David you can order a cup of coffee or a brand new car, and that whole direct to consumer model has accelerated in COVID right. We've accelerated ourselves going to upwards of 6,000 employees. We've been able to answer or manage upwards of 170 billion API requests in the last 12 months alone. Right we deliver upwards of five nines from a availability performance point of view. That means 13 seconds of downtime or less a month. And we're doing this originally starting off for the developer David as you talked about allowing developers to deliver, you know, what I call process payments, accept payments and reconcile payments. But the evolution that you're talking about Lisa has really led to three key areas of focus that our users are requesting from us. And Stripe's first operating principle is really that user first mentality similar to the Amazons where we listen to our users and they're really asking for three key areas of focus. Number one is all around modernizing their digital commerce. So this is big enterprises coming to us and saying, whether I'm a uni lever or a Ford, how do you help me with a direct to consumer a e-commerce type platform? Number one. Secondly, is companies like Deliveroo and Lyft creating what we call marketplaces. Also think about Twitter and clubhouse, more solopreneurs entrepreneurs kind of marketplaces. Third is all around SaaS business models. So think about slack and Atlassian. That are customer vivers and accelerating the journey with us around digitizing digital commerce. So that's the first area of evolution. The second area is all around what we call embedded FinTech. So we know just like Amazon helped accelerate infrastructure as a service, platform as a service and function as a service. We're helping accelerate FinTech as a service. So we believe every company in every industry aspires to add more and more FinTech capabilities in their core services that they offer to their customers. So think about a Shopify or a Lyft they're adding more FinTech capabilities, leveraging Stripe APIs that they offer to their consumers. Likewise, when you think about a Monzo bank or a and 26, what we call Neo banks. They're creating more banking as a service component so a second area of evolution is all around FinTech as a service or embedded FinTech. And the third area of focus again, listen to our users is all around users are saying. Hey, Stripe, you have our financial data. How do you help us more with business operations and automating and optimizing our business operations? So this is revenue management, revenue reconciliation, financial reporting, all of the business processes, you and I know, code to cash, order to cash, pay to procure. Help us automate, optimize, and not just optimize, but help us create net new business models. So these are the three key areas of evolution that we've seen modernizing digital commerce, embedded FinTech, and then certainly last but not least business operations and automating that. >> And your target audience is the developers. Or are you having conversations now that are more, I mean, this is like transformative to industries and disruptive. Are you having conversations higher up in the chain? >> Great, great question. And this is the parallel with Amazon, just like Amazon started with developers, AWS. And then what up to the C-suite, if you will, we're seeing the same exact thing. Obviously our DNA is developer first making it intuitive, natural easy for developers to build on Stripe. But we're seeing more and more C-suite leaders come to us and saying, help us evolve our business model, help us modernize and digitize net new business models to get new revenue streams. So those parallel work streams are both developer mindset and C-suite led is certainly a big evolution for us. And we're looking to learn from our Amazon friends as to the success that they've had there. >> Do you have any examples of projects that developers have proposed that were at first glance, completely outlandish? Something that, you know, is there any sort of corner of the chart use case where Stripe didn't think of it, some developer came up with the idea, maybe it can't be done yet. If you have an example of that, that would be very interesting. >> Yeah, I'll give you two examples. So as I said, we're definitely a user first entity. That's our operating principle. We always think about the user. So let me go to developers and say, what are you struggling with? What are you thinking about? What are the next set of things you need from us? And a simple comment around tax started to come up and do you know in the U S there's 11,000 tax jurisdictions that you and you're selling something online have to abide to these different jurisdictions. So one of the things that we then evolved into is created a Stripe tax product, which initially users or developers were really struggling with and working on. So we created a Stripe tax product. We've done an acquisition called tax jar that helps us accelerate that journey for tax. The other one is this notion of low code that we see in the marketplace right now, where developers saying. Hey, give me more embeddables on top of the primitives that you've created on top of the APIs. So we went leveraging what our customers have already done, created things like a checkout capability, which is a simple redirect highly customized for conversion, which you can just integrate to one API. You have a full checkout capability. You can embed that into your platform, which didn't exist before and needed you to really integrate into different APIs. So all of these capabilities are what developers have really focused on and built that we've done leverage and Excel on. >> Yeah, I think between Lisa and myself, we've paid taxes in about 7,000 of those >> Lisa: Yeah, probably. >> Not 11,000 jurisdictions, but all the various sales taxes and everything else. So we're sort of familiar with it. >> I think so, so here we are, you know, on the floor at re-invent. Great, as we said to be back in person, the 10th annual, but with, as each year goes by AWS has a ecosystem of partners gets bigger and bigger. The flywheel gets, I don't know, I think faster and faster, the number of announcements that came out yesterday and today talk to us about some of the common traits that Stripe and AWS share. >> Yeah. So I've mentioned a few of them. One is certainly the user first mentality where we're listening to users. That tax example is a perfect one of how do we decide new features, new capability based on user first, Amazon does that better than anyone else. Second is that developer mindset focus on the developer. Those will be the core persona we target give you an example, Lyft, we all know Lyft. They wanted to create instant payouts for their drivers. So their developers came to us and say, our developers don't want to get paid. I'm sorry. Our drivers don't want to get paid in a week or two weeks. So we work with their developers who create a instant payout mechanism. Now in six months, over 40% of their drivers are using Stripe instant payout powered by Stripe. And that's a developer first mindset again, back to AWS. And then the third is really around the go to market. And the market opportunity is very similar. You talked about the developer persona and the C-suite very similar to Amazon. But also we're not just catering to enterprise and strategic big customers. We are just so much focused on startups, SMB, mid-market, digital native, just like Amazon is. And I would say the last parallel, which is probably the most important one is innovation. I come from enterprise software where we looked at monthly, quarterly, biannual, annual release cycles. Well, as Stripe, all of that goes out the door just like Amazon. We may have a hundred to a thousand APIs in motion at any time in alpha beta production. And just like Amazon we're iterating and releasing new innovations consistently. So I would say that's probably the most important one that we have with Amazon. >> So a lot of synergies there like deep integrated trusted partner synergies it sounds like. >> Agreed, definitely and then we're seeing this. I was going more as we are going more up market. We're seeing a demand for end to end solutions that require integrations with a CRM vendor for customer 360 with our accounting vendor for pivotal procure order to cash, billing accounting with a e-commerce company like Adobe Magento to do better econ. So more end to end solutions with these tech partners, we're working with our GSI to help deliver those end to end solutions. And certainly, but not least the dev agencies who are still sort of our core constituents that help us keep relevant with those developers. >> You mentioned this at the outset, but some things bear repeating. Can you go into a little more detail on the difference between me wanting to start up a business and take credit cards as payment 10 years ago? Let's say versus today, how much of the friction have you removed from that system? >> It is literally an hour to two hour process versus weeks and months before. >> But what are those steps? Like who would I, you mentioned this, again you mentioned this already, but the go through that, go through that again who would I have to reach out to, to make this happen? And we were talking, you know, relationships with banks, et cetera, et cetera. >> Yeah. So it starts at initiating and registering that company. So imagine you going and having to register a company today, you can do that with a Stripe Atlas product in a matter of hours, get your EIN number, get your tax jurisdictions on your registration as a Delaware entity within the U S you can be anywhere at globally and go do that within a matter of one hour. That's number one, you start there. From there, then it's a matter of embedding payment embeddables within your e-commerce platform, marketplace platform, et cetera. As you've heard us talk about seven lines of code to get payments going, you can quickly onboard accept payments, process payments, reconcile payments all within an hour. And that's just the start. But now you get into more complex use cases around marketplaces and multi-party connection. Multi-party payouts, different commission rates, different subscription models. Think about a flat tier model, a metered tier model, all of these different things that we've abstracted and allow you to just use one to three different integrations to help accelerate and use that in your digital commerce platform. So all of these different workflows have is what we've automated through our APIs. >> Dave: That's unbelievable. >> Yeah. >> It really is. >> It is unbelievable, the amount of automation and innovation that's gone on in such a short time period. What are some of the things as we kind of wrap up here that we can look forward to from stripe from a roadmap perspective, technology wise, partner wise? >> Yes. I mean, we have a slew of data you can imagine billions of billions of transactional data. And you guys know what we do with data is we're looking at fraud prevention. We're looking at, we have a product called radar that looks at fraud, we're doing acceptance, adaptive acceptance to do more AIML learned data and authorization. We're also looking at how do we feed a lot of this financial data into the right mechanisms to allow you to then create new business models on top of this, whether it's cross sell upsell to new user business capture. As well as you know, one of the things I did not talk about, which coming from a farming background is this notion of Stripe climate. Where we have upwards of 2000 companies across 37 countries that are leveraging our Stripe climate product to give back to tech advanced companies that are helping in carbon offset. And super exciting times there from an ESG environmental social governance point of view. So all of those combined is what excites us about the future at Stripe. >> Wow. The future seems unlimited. Lots going on. >> Super excited. Zaki, thank you so much for joining Dave and me talking about what's going on with Stripe. All the innovation that's going on. The synergies with AWS and what's coming down the pipe. We appreciate your insights and your time. >> Thank you, Lisa, thank you, David. Appreciated All right. For Dave Nicholson, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the Cube. The global leader in live tech coverage. (lighthearted piano music)

>> From The Cube Studios in Palo Alto, in Boston, connecting with thought leaders around the globe. These are Cloud Native Insights. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman the host of Cloud Native Insights where we're talking to companies and practitioners about how they take advantage of the innovation and agility of the cloud. Happy to welcome to the program I have first time guests, you know, Ido Safruti he is the co-founder and CTO of Perimeter X going to talk him in a dual role, both as a practitioner and their adoption of Cloud Native Technologies serverless specifically as well as they are a Cloud Native supplier in the security realm. Ido thanks so much for joining us. Nice to have you on the program. >> Yeah, good to be here. Thanks. >> All right. So Ido, if you could, you're co founder of Perimeter X, give us just, if you would, a little bit of your background and you know, what Perimeter X does and we'll, go into it from there. >> Sure. So as CTO, I'm in charge of the research, engineering, and product team at Perimeter X, we are a vendor, a Cloud Native vendor of web application security protecting all kinds of different business logic abuses for our customers, mostly large websites that are in demand of web-scale. So not only doing the protection or the application, but also integrated into multiple infrastructure and running at scale. We're solving problems like account takeover, carding, a major card data skimming and so on. >> One of the conversations we've been having the last couple of years from security is, you know, there's no shortage of new threats, the surface area of attack, keep getting more here in 2020, everybody's working from home more, the people that are doing attacks didn't stop working. So if you could just, you know, how long has Perimeter X been around? And I want to lead up to the discussion of serverless, you know, what was the architecture considerations before? And what started leading you towards making a change architecturally? >> Yeah, so Perimeter X was founded almost six years ago, a little less than six years ago. And we were a Cloud Native Solution to begin with. We identified the challenges of where the gap security in native cloud application is. For in many cases, security solutions are not leveraging the breadth and the new architecture of where applications are built. And we're more of trying to slap in a standard enterprise security and on other cloud infrastructure. When we started, we wanted to integrate and adopt the cloud and adopt the flexibility of the specificity of the edge to help enhance our customer's infrastructure by adding security onto that versus forcing them to rearchitect it when they integrate security into it. >> Well, it's addressing, you say six years ago. I can't remember hearing the term Cloud Native that long ago. Obviously Cloud has been around for a while, but when I started this one of the discussions around Cloud Native was, Oh, people were talking about adopting containers and Kubernetes. And I said, they're great tools to help from, you know, the infrastructure standpoint, but you're talking about right, living in the Cloud, taking advantage of cloud services, you know. That's where we really see the opportunity in Cloud Native. So, you know, when you say you were built for the cloud, but you know, things like containers, server lists probably weren't doing those six years ago, maybe, or were you? >> Actually, yeah, so we started early versions of obviously all dockerized Grenades was not that great back then. So we were orchestrating some things on our own and gradually adopting other orchestration and mesh for our own service that is obviously running on multiple cloud vendors. But from us, from our point of view, the key for cloud was how can we enable our customers, and how can we integrate better with them in a way that enhance their infrastructure versus add friction? Because the challenge usually with security, is that security in most cases or traditionally, was adding friction and delays and complexity to developer process. And we're designing our solution to begin with on how can we leverage these new technologies? How can we leverage the fact that CDNs and edges are becoming smarter and can, you can start deploying your own payloads and logic to make our logic integrated with them and to partner with this cloud players in order to enable our customers to add these additional tiers. And I think this is from my point of view, one of the key capabilities of having the capabilities of computed edge and serverless, is making a lightweight integration and making your existing infrastructure smarter by making it easy to incorporate third party vendors or other solutions or more logic without forcing a wholly architectural solution. >> Yeah, no, no. You bring up some great points. I remember back the early days of Docker, it was, can we get the atomic unit to be closer to what the application is. But you know, my background is in infrastructure and it was okay, It went from the server to the VM, to the container. Yeah, there's an application that sits on top of it, but I don't think about it as opposed to serverless starts with the developer first and you know, how I build my application and then there are certain things that I have to worry about the platform. So, help us understand doing containers, looking at serverless, was it okay, we're going to completely overhaul and throw out what we had because there's something new and better. Are you doing still some containers and some serverless? Help us understand, you know, what drove that transition and what the outcomes were? >> Yeah, so our infrastructure our machine learning algorithms, the data processing that the heavy lifting that we're running on our own infrastructure, which is again, Cloud Native Infrastructure. But something that we're managing in many cases is using containers is using other environments because we were running heavy payloads. We're not fully relying on some other platform to run for us. We're leveraging a lot of these technologies to run it and run it in a more efficient way. Where we're adopting serverless is both in some of the front end decisions. So making smarter load balancing decision integrating with some other cloud vendors to help make sure that requests are coming in the right view, and things like this, but where it is more important even then is how can we make ourselves relevant for customers to adopt serverless and how can we help introduce security into these environments? Because, if you're looking at traditional security, if you're, if you're so it's more about, if I go to that one, how can I enable our customers adopt serverless? How can I enable our customers adopt new technologies into cloud? Because it could be a limitation if you're, if you're a security policy or if your architecture is such, that requires everything to go through a specific security proxy or some firewall, it may force you to utilize very limited architectures. If you want to deploy now with payload on some, on Lambda or on, on your CDN, it typically will be way in front of your traditional enterprise security solutions. How can you make that application smarter? How can you make that application sort, self-sufficient by connecting modules, by making sure that you're including modules that integrate security, and bring the security with you everywhere. So, so this is the motion that we're trying to define here. >> Well, and I'm sure you've got a really interesting viewpoint that I'd love to hear on this, Ido. So if you look at, you know, most new technologies, especially in the cloud space, serverless specifically, you know, costs that should be less expensive, you know, flexible. I should be able to, you know, make changes, and speed. I should be able to do more faster, but always when you look at those, you say, well, but what about security? Can I do all of those things, you know, be faster, better, cheaper, more agile, and not be less secure? So I'd love to hear any thoughts you have on kind of the, you know, the typical things, but also your security angle on them? >> Yeah. So one of the benefit of using serverless, and I think there are two types, initially thinking of serverless one is running your code in some, backend application, that may access different things, but you don't need to manage for scale because there is some platform that manage that. Which is one great option, what you're seeing more and more, and we're working in collaboration with Fastly and where you can see that on other edge platforms is having this notion of serverless, How can you deploy code to the edge? And the benefit there is that you can mitigate a lot of the risks outside your data center, outside of your cloud, that if there is, and this is where security plays so well with that, because you want to mitigate the risks and the attack as far away from your application as possible. So if you can deploy the logic that is doing that, or making decisions at the edge, it helps you improve your infrastructure cost. It helps you improve some of the applications that are still in the backend, so you can gradually forward deploy some of the logic that is relevant at the edge and getting the scalability, getting this ability to scale without limit, because a CDN or edge vendor, he has a lot of capacity and withhold if it's a denial of service attack, or if it's any other type of attack, weigh this logic in hand. Or even, sometimes it's just skill. Maybe you had a very good marketing campaign and you were having a lot of traffic. If you can deploy this skill somewhere that can handle that in a distributed, efficient way, you are having even better. >> Well, and it sounds like that that fits into what Perimeter X does. You know, when I think about edge, you know, scale concerns, security concerns are, you know, some of those top of mind as are just, you know, how. You know, can automation things like machine learning or AI help me? Cause usually that scale or a distributed nature of it means that it's not necessarily something that people alone could take care of themselves. Am I getting right, a little bit where Perimeter X is helping their customers? >> Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the idea is to connect, to help and to help offline offset some of the logic or some of the capabilities that, that you don't want your business to be an expert in. So if you're a retailer, you want to be able to sell the best to optimize accomodation for your customers and to handle that you don't want to be an expert in detecting bots or in identifying malicious code or things of that sort. And if you can offset that and with a lightweight, easy integration that does not limit your ability to innovate and adopt new technologies, this is what we're trying to help. Let us focus at this. But by integrating the edge by integrating with partners like Fastly and so that we can help enhance the infrastructure and add more capabilities, where you can focus on doing your own business and we can help allow and enable additional technologies. >> Along your serverless journey, what partners, what other vendors were helpful along the way? As I've looked at it, it's a relatively young ecosystem, but it's robust. So, you know, I'm curious who, some of the companies that have helped along the way? >> Yep. I think Fastly is definitely one that is from their earlier infrastructure. They always had the component of exposing their edge and making it more programmable via configuration and setting logic. And now rolling out a computed edge that is giving even more flexibility. Other CDNs are opening their edge as well with all kinds of tools, again, Lambda from AWS and other services. So this is one component of how do you manage that? How do you always read that? There are issues of how much state can you manage their access to data? And there are different services that allows that. Other platforms, which are more of the platform as a service that are not traditionally considered serverless. And you can think of it as eCommerce platforms helps you deploy your logic and some sometimes go to application into their ecosystem and helps you focus on again, managing your application. So think of Magento, think of a Salesforce cloud, these kind of commerce applications that you can deploy your logic. They're all fit into that ecosystem of help you. You want to write your code to that, your key on and let someone else manage the scale, let someone else manage some of the things that are common tool. >> Well, yeah, that's definitely one you see diversity of solutions at edge. You know, very different from if you were thinking kind of their traditional enterprise data center. Any, you know, as a CTO, when you look at edge, you know, where we were the maturation of this whole solution, or are there areas specifically that you expect in the next, you know, six, 12, 18 months that we will see some things solidify, mature down the line. >> Yeah. Yeah. So I think that the state where the edge compute is at now is more about deploying logic that is remote from the data center. So there is a limit. And if you look across different vendors to the more IO or data access capabilities of these loads. So if you can write the code and make it self sufficient, it's easier and it's more common to find platforms that will love it. What you're starting to see is how you add the data layer into that tier and making it more accessible. And that opens the gate for many more reach an interesting reputation, because once you can have a key value store, and once you can manage a state and modify configuration, you can then start deploying more complex applications and make more decisions. Do I see the billing system running entirely on the edge? probably not. There are things where you want to store it in the database. There are things that make sense to have it in some backend infrastructure, but a lot of payloads more and more environments are going there. And I think these additional services of queuing services, data services, database like services. So can, can I run a transaction on the edge? These kinds of technologies are currently emerging and you can see them in different levels for different vendors. And they will definitely open the gate even further for more and more patrons will be adopted at the edge. >> All right. Well, Ido last question I have for you, What advice would you give for your peers out there? as you said, you know, you were early in Docker adoption. You've done serverless adoption, you know, Edge is something that is gaining a lot of attention. What advice would you give to people here in 2020 as they look at, you know, the variety of Cloud Native options out there? >> I think the easy one is anything new that you build look around and figure out what is the best technology that can help you get there faster? And how can you build in a more strategic way for C-suite executive, if it's the CTO, CIO, CSO, think on how can you enable your team to move faster? How can you enable your team by the solutions and technologies that you select to have the flexibility of moving faster? how can you enable them to, to adopt new technologies and make it available? How can, and this is, you need some practices because you need to make sure that you are getting the right metrics. So whenever that you're using vendors that will help you collect and monitor the services and get the insights, because suddenly if anyone can deploy anything anywhere, then there is some concern about loss of control. So finding the right vendors that can help you or adopting the right processes that helps you gain this visibility while still enabling them to go anywhere. This is key. At least for us, it was key. And this is from wearing my product hat when we're building our services, this is what we're trying to enable our customers to do with this security. >> Well, Ido Safruti, thank you so much for sharing your journey, really appreciate you having on the program. >> Sure, thanks. >> And if you have people we should talk to, I would love hearing the stories of Cloud Native, how those adjustments are going and sharing your information with your peers. I'm Stu Miniman and look forward to hearing more your Cloud Native sites. (Calming music)

>> Live, from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Magento Imagine 2019, brought to you Adobe. >> Welcome back to theCUBE, Lisa Martin with Jeff Frick. We have been covering Imagine 2019 in Vegas, all day today, talking all things eCommerce, innovation, technology, the customer experience. Jeff, one of the biggest themes, I think, that we've heard today, from all of our guests, is how strong this community is, how naturally it was developed in the last ten years, and how influential it is to delivering exceptional customer experience technology. >> In fact, Jason said without the community, there would be no Magento. So it's, it's ingrained in the culture. It's ingrained in the DNA. I think, you know, doing some of the research, you know, there was people talking about the dark days of Magento, as it went into eBay, and apparently whatever that plan was, that didn't work. And then out of eBay into private equity. Out of private equity into, now, Adobe. And it sounds like the community's kind of been following along, and maybe they were holding their breath a little bit, a year ago, but it sounds like they kind of got through that, that kind of concern knothole, if you will, and kind of popped out the other side, and realized there's a whole lot of opportunity that comes to Magento, via being part of Adobe now that they didn't have before. So I think, it sounds like they're good with it, and they're ready to go, and nothing but opportunity ahead. >> Yeah, you know, I think with any acquisition, and, you know, we cover so many technology shows, and we've been part of acquisitions before at different companies. They're challenging. There's always, I think, natural trepidation. I think it's just a natural response that anybody, probably, from an executive to an individual contributor level, is going to have. But one of the things that came up so resolutely, was how organic the Magento community has been developed over time. That, like you said, as Jason was saying, without it, there is no Magento. Not only are they influential. It's very much a symbiotic relationship, that pleasantly, surprisingly, sounds like it's been integrated very nicely, into Adobe. And to your point, they now are seeing, wow, there's a tremendous amount of technology and resources that we didn't have the opportunity to leverage before. Talking about the experience, the digital experience business of Adobe's, which is growing. Grew 20% year over year, 2017 to 2018. On a very strong trajectory this year. A lot of opportunity to enable merchants of any size to have this really 360 degree of the customer experience, and manage it with analytics, and advertising, and marketing, and add the commerce piece, so that they can take that marketing interaction and actually convert it to revenue. >> Right, right. I mean, look at Adobe. I mean, they brought in Magento, which we know, late last year. They also brought in Marketo at almost about the same time, $4.7 billion. So they're making huge moves. And I think it's a pretty unique situation, where, again, they come from the creative, and now, with the data, and a sophisticated platform, and you talk about the AB testing, again. It used to be just AB, now it's AB times literally millions and millions of customized experiences delivered to the client. And then now, again, I think really an interesting point of view is where then you bring the commerce to the point of engagement rather than trying to use the engagement as a way to drive people to commerce. I mean, they seem really well positioned, I think they're going to really enjoy people like Accenture, and some of the of the other big system integrators that now are going to be, you know, behind this platform. So it seems to be a fit, a marriage made in heaven. It almost makes you wonder why Adobe was so late to have an eCommerce platform, which is the thing that kind of surprises me, I think, the most. >> Yeah, well, it also gives them the opportunity to compete with Shopify and with Salesforce Commerce, and kind of harness this brand power. But you talked about something that we've talked about all day, and that's bringing the transaction and the commerce experience to me as a consumer wherever I am, whether it's in app shopping through Instagram. Rather than, you know, delivering me a personalized experience, leveraging the power of these technologies, to understand the right things about me as a consumer, to deliver me an experience that is frictionless. It's going to allow me to have a seamless experience. We talked about that with progressive web apps, and how that's going to enable next generation shopping for merchants of all sizes to enable. Don't just engage me on my mobile, if that's where I want to be. If you don't have the opportunity to convert me seamlessly to actually transact, there's a huge adjustable market or gap in converting that to revenue, which Jason Woolsey also talked about. Kind of thinking about next steps for Adobe and what they're going to be able to do to help those merchants capture in real time, leveraging the power of technology, emerging technologies like AI, in real-time to make that shoppable moment turn into dollars for the merchant. >> Right, lot of great things. I thought it was interesting having TJ Gamble on, and talked about coopetition. Right? Coopetition is such a fundamental part of Silicon Valley and the world in which we live in. And he said, you know, if you're making fat margin, as Jeff Bezos loves to say, your margin is my opportunity. You're going to compete with Amazon, but in the meantime, you got to compete with them. So to enable integration into the Amazon platform with your Magento store, the integration into Google Shopping, integration into Instagram purchases, in app purchases, I mean, these really opening up the opportunities for these smaller retailers, mid-sized retailers, to compete in a really complicated and super hyper-competitive world. But now they can, again, focus on their brand, which we hear over and over and over, focus on their experience, focus on their community, and leverage some of this special breed technology under the covers across platform, across different modes of buying. Because the other thing we hear over and over and over is you got to give people choice. You can't say no. So if they want to buy it through Amazon, let 'em buy it through Amazon. If they want to buy it through Instagram, let 'em buy it through Instagram. If they want to come to you eCommerce site, let 'em come to your eCommerce site But, you know, in opening up all those channels for the merchant to be able to execute their transactions regardless of how the customer got to them, or how, more importantly, they got to the customer. >> And, you know, the SMB front is really key that you brought up, because, in the last year, since the acquisition was announced, about a year ago, and completed, I think in September of 2018, there was not just concern from the community, that we talked about at the beginning of this segment, but also the small and the medium business. Like, well, Adobe has a really big presence in enterprise. Is that going to be cannibalized with this acquisition of Magento, who had such a strong presence with those smaller merchants? And you mentioned some of thee things with Amazon and Google that we heard yesterday and today. I think really assuaging some of those concerns that the smaller businesses had, but also, allowing these smaller merchants to sort of level the playing field, and have access to the power of a branded Amazon storefront that allows a smaller business to get some differentiation, whereas before they didn't have that. So I think we heard a lot about that today, and how, I think, those smaller brands are probably, maybe breathing a sign of relief, that this acquisition is really going to enable them, with a lot more tools, but not at the, you know, cannibalizing what they have been doing with Magento for so long. >> Right, right. And some other fun discussions. I really enjoyed the time with Tina, talking about influencer marketing. It's amazing how that continues to evolve at a really fast pace. Right? A derivation of professional endorsement, which is something we've known ever since Joe Namath put on stockings many moons ago. But to see it go from big influencers, to micro-influencers, you know. How do you sponsor people, give them money, engage as a brand, and still maintain that they legitimately like your product, use your product. I think it's a really fascinating space to, again, to be able to purchase within that Instagram application, I think, is really interesting. And then a lot of conversations about the post transaction engagement. You know, send them not one email confirmation that your items are coming, but send them two. And really to think about lifetime value of the customer, and engaging the customer via content, and, oh, by the way, there'll be some transactions in commerce as well. I think it's really forward-looking, and really enjoyed that conversation as well. >> I did too. I didn't know the difference between an influencer and a micro-influencer, and you kind of infer based on just the name alone. But also how brands have the opportunity to leverage data, to evaluate maybe we should actually make more investments in somebody with a thousand followers, for example, than somebody with a hundred thousand. Because the revenue attribution, or the website traffic lift that they're going to get from a micro-influencer could far outweigh the benefits, financially, than going with somebody, a celebrity or what not, that, as you said, back to, you know, Joe Namath, many decades ago. So that was interesting, but it's also a good use of using data to build brand reputation, build, increase customer lifetime value, but also get so much more targeted, and really understand how to operationalize the commerce portion of your business, and through whom, through which channels you're going to see the biggest bang for your buck. >> Yeah, it's really interesting times, you know, this idea that the apps follow you. I mean, my favorite example is Spotify. Super sophisticated app. Right? I can be listening to my phone. I get into my car. It follows me. I go into my office. It follows me on my computer. I go out on my bike. It follows me. It stays the same state. And so, for the commerce and the community to be able to follow you around is a really interesting idea. And again, it was Hillary Mason, actually, that first came up with the term that, you know, AI, and good recommendations done well are magic, and done poorly, are creepy. I think it's always going to be this interesting fine line. Again, I think the whole concept of, you know, using old data and how fast do you update it, and that's kind of the example. I've been looking at tents. I bought a tent. I don't want to see ads for tents anymore. Right? It's time to see an ad for a sleeping bag, or a camp stove. And these are really happening in real-time. You know, we've heard about Omnichannel. We've heard about 360 view of the customer, ad nauseam. You've been in this business for a long time. But it sounds like it's finally coming together, and it's finally where we have the data, we have the access to the data, the speed of the analytics, and just the raw horsepower in modeling that we can now start to apply this real-time, ML, to data, in-flight, to be able to serve up the not creepy but correct recommendations, at the right time to the right person. It's getting closer and closer to reality. >> It is getting closer, and as you were talking about that, one of the things that popped into my head is going from the creepy to the magic that is, you think, wow, is really leveraging this data and using the power of machine learning and AI, a great facilitator. Or is the bottom foundation order management? If you don't have the, or inventory management. If you don't have the inventory, it's great to have all these capabilities to transact in real time, but if you can't fulfill it, you're going to sink. >> Yeah. >> So Magento, with, you know, some of their core technology enabling this. Really enabling, not just enabling the 360 degree customer view, but being able to fulfill it. Those are table stakes, and game changers. >> Right. >> For merchants of any size. >> Right, and I think they do have to engage. I mean, they have to be brands. Right? Because a commodity item I can go get anywhere. There's got to be a reason to come. Lot of conversations, not so much here, but at the Adobe summit, in terms of the content piece, and having an ongoing dialog and an ongoing content relationship, with your client. Now you can slice and dice and serve that up lots of different ways based on who they are and the context. But if you don't have that, you can't just compete on price. You just can't compete on inventory, 'cause Amazon is going to win. Right? You can't stock, my favorite thing is, is shirt, shirt little pins in here. How do you stock those? You can't. They don't cost any money, and you don't sell that many. Amazon can. So, find you niche, you know. Engage your customers. Engage your community, and there'll be some transactions that come along with this. And I think it's really reinforced that, I think, its probably really timely for Magento to be part of Adobe, because eCommerce, just purely by itself, is going to be tougher and tougher to do unless you've got this deeper relationship with your customers, beyond simply transacting something. >> Exactly. So I enjoyed hosting, as I always do with you, Jeff. Learned a lot today, and excited to hear about what's next for this event, now that Adobe is leveraging the power of Magento. >> Well, we heard the announcements, Gary's going to make the announcement tomorrow. So hang out for the keynote tomorrow to find out more about Imagine 2020. We'll be there. >> 2020, yes. >> 2020, because we'll know everything in 2020. >> We will know. That's right. I can't wait. >> 2020 hindsight. >> I'm waiting for that. Well, Jeff, as I said, always a pleasure hosting with you. >> You too, Lisa. >> I brought the sea urchin necklace out. >> I like it. I like it. >> This is just for Jeff. It's making it's appearance on theCUBE. We want to thank you for watching, for Jeff Frick, I'm Lisa Martin, and you've been watching theCUBE live from Imagine 19 at The Wynn Las Vegas. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's The Cube, covering Magento Imagine 2019. Brought to you by Adobe. >> Welcome to The Cube. Lisa Martin with Jeff Frick, live at The Wynn Las Vegas, for Magento Imagine 2019. This is a really buzzy event. All e-commerce innovation, tech talks, with about 3,500 folks, and we're excited to welcome to The Cube Tina Mulqueen, CEO of Kindred PR Marketing Agency as well as contribute with Forbes, Digital Trends, expert on e-commerce, I would say. Welcome to The Cube. >> Thank you so much for having me. I'm happy to be here. >> So we were talking about influencer marketing before we went live. And you have been doing, been working in that kind of before it was even a concept. We were just saying how much marketing has changed in the last few years alone, and how brands have had to to survive and be profitable, evolve with that. Give us a bit of a perspective, first on kind of Kindred PR, what you're doing, how you got involved in influencer marketing. >> Sure, so I was really fortunate to have some great mentors early in my marketing career that kind of ushered me along in the right direction and said hey, I think we should really pay attention to this whole Twitter thing and what's happening with these real, everyday people that are amassing a following on Twitter, and that's really where it started was on that platform. So I ended up on a team for CBS that did some of the influencer marketing for Vanity Fair and for their coverage of The Insider and Entertainment Tonight, and we would work with them to get event coverage to trend online. And as you mentioned, that was before, really, we knew what influencer marketing was. It wasn't really, it didn't have to a name, so to speak, at that time. And so I learned a lot from then, and we have kind of come full circle with influencer marketing, where it, I was at first working with these sort of micro influencers, as we would call them now. And then it was a lot of brands working with more of the celebrity influencers, like the Kim Kardashians of the world, and now it's gone back to brands are really interested in these micro influencers again because of the concept of authenticity, which is a big one right now, that marketers are paying attention to. >> Exactly what I was going to say. >> So how do they dance around the authenticity? It's such an interesting and knife edge, right? Because you want people to promote your products because they like them, and that's the original celebrity endorsement back in the early days, right? People actually did use the product that they endorsed. But now you get paid endorsements, and people can see through that. At the same time, it obviously has some results, or people would not continue to invest, and now it's come full circle, whereas you said because of the internet, I with some particular interest can reach a huge number of people around a really small interest set, because of the distribution of the internet. >> Right. So what's interesting is, influencer marketing, when we first really started talking about influencer marketing, we treated it as word-of-mouth marketing. And it had some incredible benefits over some more traditional kinds of marketing because it was word of mouth. And then because influencer marketing had a lot of investments, brands were investing heavily in influencer marketing, and we were dealing more with celebrity influencers, consumers became smarter as well during this time. And then they started looking at these celebrity endorsements and realizing that these are not real endorsements. And so I think that's where we're seeing this shift back to micro influencers, and people that are really using the products that these brands are touting. >> But how does a brand, how do they engage with the micro influencer? >> Actually, there's a really great case study that I always use as an example of this, and it's actually BECCA Cosmetics, which, BECCA's one of the, I think the number one, sales cosmetic line in Sephora. And they reached out, I think it was about a year ago, maybe a couple of years ago now. They reached out to an influencer because they realized that their website traffic was going up every time a certain influencer would go live on YouTube and was using their products. So BECCA reached out to this influencer that was organically using the products, and collaborated with the influencer to create a line of products of her own. And that really, I think they sold out within the first hour when they actually went live with the product line. So that's a great example of how to engage with an influencer that is organically using your brand, and making sure that you're also including their audience, in, like, the iteration of the product, because then the audience of the influencer is also invested. >> And what defines influencer versus a micro influencer? I imagine the sheer volume of followers, but there's got to be more to it than that, because there's this really cool example that you gave, what BECCA Cosmetics found was much more probably authenticity. So talk to us about not just the number drivers there, but some of the other, I mean, it's one thing to be able to blast something to 100,000 people. It's a whole other thing to actually be able to engage their followers and convert it to a transaction. >> Right. So I think that often when we hear brands talking about micro or macro influencers, they really are talking about the number of followers, but I think you bring up a really great point with respect to that level of engagement of that following and how to really tap into somebody that is engaging their following. So I think brands are going toward actual experts in their field, or actual experts in the product line in a bigger capacity now because they know that what they say is going to be more meaningful to their audience and more engaging to their audience, rather than based on number of followers alone. So there's a lot of different things that are going into play to create a better context for marketing. >> I'm curious how other metrics have evolved beyond just the transaction. So there's the followers, and then, you know, there's obviously transactions, as you said, there's website traffic. But as people, as brands are starting to realize that engagement, ongoing engagement, interaction with content is part of the relationship, separate from and a value to the actual transaction. How have their metrics changed? How are they reviewing these programs? I'm sure a lot of it at first was, "Well, we hope it works, we think it's working." But how has that matured over time? >> It definitely has matured, and there are some platforms out there that will try to quantify influencer marketing in different ways than we've seen in the past. It's gotten a lot more sophisticated. That said, marketers still have a real challenge ahead of them in terms of quantifying their efforts in a meaningful way, because it's still hard to put a number to brand sentiment. And that's a lot of what influencer marketing is. >> Right. And is it, from an investment point of view, I always think of people with a large bucket of money, right, they put a very small piece in their venture fund, which has a real low probability of a hit, but if it hits, it hits big. And when they're budgeting for the influencer program, is it kind of like that? You know, we've got this carve-out that we are not quite sure what the ROI is. We think it's important. We don't want to miss out. Versus, you know, what I'm spending on print or what I'm spending on TV, or what I'm spending on kind of traditional campaigns. How are marketers looking at that within their portfolio? >> It is a great questions, and I think that marketers know that they need to invest in influencer marketing, so we're seeing an influx of investment coming in through influencer marketing. That said, I've been in a lot of conversations with brands that are talking about, do we go the macro influencer route or do we go with the micro influencer route? And right now I think that brands are starting to realize that if you get a lot of voices or a number of voices that are sharing the same sentiment and that are able to feed off of each other with respect to the conversation and amplify each other because even if you have micro influencers with smaller following count, they're going to amplify each other's content, and that ends up in the long run, as we talked about, being more authentic. So that's where a lot of the conversations are going right now in terms of how to spend that influencer marketing budget and weighing the pros and cons of those different options. >> Well, marketing is and should be a science these days. There is so much data about all of us from everything we do every day that brands need to be able to evaluate that, leveraging platforms from Adobe Magento for example, going back to the BECCA Cosmetics and thinking well, if they evaluate these micro influencers and the lift and the traffic that they get, if they're actually using that data appropriately then that should be able to inform how they're actually carving up their investment dollars into which influencers, macro or micro, they know that is going to make the biggest impact on revenue. So it behooves marketing organizations to become scientific and actually use all this consumer data that we are all putting out through our phones, on social devices, constantly. >> Absolutely. I think it's a great point. And I hear often from clients too that they have, they've invested in these platforms that will sort of try to analyze the data, but they're not doing anything with that data. So a lot of e-commerce merchants and retailers, if you don't have a strategy on how you're going to implement that what you're learning from your consumers, then it ends up falling flat. >> What's the biggest surprise you hear from marketers today in terms of this influencer marketing? Are they confused, they're getting it, are there any, I mean you had one really good success story, are there any other, you know, kind of success stories you can share that this is a very different way to get your message into the marketplace? >> You know, one thing that I think people should do more of, that it kind of surprises me that we aren't seeing more of is using media as a channel for e-commerce merchants to have an affiliate strategy. So basically utilizing influencers in collaboration with a media channel to be able to have a new revenue stream. I think that that's something that we haven't seen very often. It's something that when I was working as the CMO for a public trading company called Grey Cloak Technologies, we worked with Sherell's, which is a company that we were acquiring at the time to consult with Marie Claire on how to incorporate influencers into their e-commerce strategy as a publisher. And that's something that I think that people could take more advantage of. >> Even just with affiliate codes or coupon codes and those types of things? They're just not really executing on it that well. >> Right, right. And I think that part of it is a technological component, like the technology isn't quite there to be able to implement, well, to be able to implement that on a wide scale. Like Marie Claire, Sherell's ended up creating the technology for them to be able to incorporate influencers into their e-commerce strategy. But I think that we're going to see more of that. >> Right, because for the influencer, that's one of many sources of revenue that they need to execute on if they're actually going to build, you know, a lifestyle business around being, you know, quote-unquote influencer. They need that affiliate revenue on top of their advertising revenue and all these other little pieces, selling t-shirts, etc. >> Right, right. And we're seeing some companies that are coming to the table to try to provide solutions. One company that I've been watching for a while is called COSIGN, and their platform basically allows influencers to integrate on the platform and link things through social media so that people can buy through a picture, on Facebook for example. So I think we're going to see more of those types of technologies as well. >> Let's talk kind of on the spirit of trends and some of the things that you are seeing. There was this big trend in the last few years of everybody wanting to be able to, we can get anything through Amazon, right? And we can get in a matter of hours. But looking at, and seeing some big box stores that did not do a good job of being able to blend physical, digital, virtual, all these storefronts. What though are you seeing in terms of companies, maybe enterprises, needing to sort of still have or offer a brick and mortar experience? Like we were talking to HP Inc. this morning, he was on stage, and this click and collect program that they launched in APEC where depending on their region, people need to be able to start and actually transact online, but actually fulfill in store. In terms of like, maybe, either reverse engineering online to brick and mortar or hybridizing the two, what are some of the trends that you're seeing that businesses really need to start paying attention to? >> Sure, so I think that omnichannel has been a buzzword for some time, and the way that marketers are looking at omnichannel now, or the way that retailers are looking at omnichannel now is a little bit different. At first, when we started talking about the concept of create this sort of seamless interplay between brick and mortar and online storefronts, it was about taking the brick and mortar experience and putting it online. And now I think marketers are getting better at realizing that those are two completely different channels, and your customer's in a different place in both of those channels. So you need to give them an experience that is relevant for the channel, and it can be totally different than what we're used to in traditional retail stores. But brick and mortar obviously does have a place. We're seeing Amazon come out with their own brick and mortar locations, and we're seeing different e-commerce startups have brick and mortar locations and be very successful with them too as an e-commerce first storefront. So there's definitely a place for brick and mortar. I think people will always have to shop in brick and mortar storefronts, although we obviously are going to get more sophisticated delivery options, and that's coming as well. But I think that it's really an interplay and it's understanding what the channels are and where your consumers are at in that space. >> And then the whole next generation of that, which we're hearing about here, like shopping inside of Instagram. So now as opposed to a destination or I'm going to some place to buy something, whether it's online or a store, now it's actually just part of experiencing the media, as you said, and oh by the way, while I'm here, that looks interesting, I'll take one of those as well. Whole different level of experience that the retailers now have to support. >> Right, absolutely. There are other technology platforms too that, like one of them is basically producing video content that you can scroll over, or let's say you were just watching a commercial on your television, or maybe it's not even a commercial. Maybe it's like real long form content, and if you scroll over a product in the image, you can purchase it out of that video. And so these things are coming as well. It's really an exciting time. But it's an exciting time to be creative as well, because you have to have some creativity behind these strategies in order to make an impression on the consumer. >> It's exciting and creepy at the same time. (Jeff laughing) I don't know if my wallet can handle that. But we'll see. But one of the things I was wondering, when you were talking about, for example, Amazon going, starting as this online mega store and now having brick and mortar stores, the acquisition of Whole Foods. I can't go in there and shop without being asked if I'm a Prime member. But what are some of the sort of foundational customer experience expectations that, because I would think personalization would be kind of a common foundation that whether I'm shopping online with whatever, I want whoever I'm buying from, especially if I have a history, I want them to know what I've bought before, maybe my average order value, to be able to kind of incentivize loyalty. But I probably want the same thing if I'm in a brick and mortar. Are you seeing some sort of key foundations that businesses, whether they do one, the other, or both, need to put in place that can span both? >> Absolutely. So I think it's a great point. I think personalization and the experience. Obviously we're hearing so much about experience in terms of e-commerce, but in brick and mortar stores in particular. But I think that the personalization piece is such an important one. But I also think that it's now getting to where we need to personalize more on the marketing for no matter what channel it is. So you need to bring that physical experience with the customer to your e-commerce efforts as well so that you can, for example, if you're going to email market to me, I want it to be relevant. I want to know that you have been paying attention to my shopping habits, and it's kind of a fine line with respect to data, but if you're going to be using my data, I want to make sure that it's useful to me and it saves me time. >> And it kind of goes back to a point Jeff and I have heard a number of times today, and that's validating me as a consumer that you understand that what I'm interested in that you have to offer, you understand it, it's important to both of us. Well Tina, I wish we had more time to keep talking with you, but we thank you so much for joining us on The Cube this afternoon and talking with us about some of the things that you're seeing, your experiences. And now I know the difference between an influencer, macro and micro, and why they can be so important to brands of any size. So thank you for your time. >> Thank you so much for having me. >> Our pleasure >> Thank you. >> For Jeff Frick, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching us on The Cube live from Las Vegas at Magento Imagine 2019. Thanks for watching. (upbeat digital music)