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

>> Announcer: Live from San Francisco it's TheCUBE covering Samsung Developer Conference 2017. Brought to you by Samsung. (digital music) >> Hey welcome back and we're live here in San Francisco this is TheCUBE's exclusive coverage Samsung Developer Conference #SDC2017, I'm John Furrier co-founder of SiliconANGLE Media Coast My next guest is Ken Yeoung tech reporter here inside TheCUBE. I've known Ken for almost 10 years now plus been in the Silicon Valley beat scene covering technology, communities, and all the cutting edge tech but also some of the old established companies. Great to see you. >> Likewise, thanks for having me. >> So tech reporter, let's have a little reporter session here because reporting here at Samsung, to me, is my first developer conference with Samsung. I stopped going to the Apple World Developer Conference when it became too much of a circus around, you know, close to a couple of years before Steve Jobs died. >> Right. >> Now this whole scene well we will have to talk to Steve Gall when we get down there but here, my first one, my reports an awakening I get the TV thing but I'm like IoT that's my world. >> Ken: Oh really? >> I want to see more IoT >> Ken: Yeah. >> So it's good to see Samsung coming into the cloud and owning that. So, that's exciting for me. What do you see as a report that you could file? >> You know, so it's funny because I actually did write a post this morning after watching the keynote yesterday. While I was at VentureBeat a few months ago I reported on Bixby's launch when it came out with the Galaxy S8 and when I heard about what that was it was kind of interesting. That was one of the biggest selling points for me to switch over from my iPhone. And when I tried it out it was interesting. I was kind of wondering how it would stand up against Google Assistant because both of them are installed on the same device. But now as you see with Bixby 2.0 and now with the SmartThings you start to see Samsung's vision. Right now it's on a mobile, it's just very piecemeal. But now when you tackle it on with the TVs, with the fridges, monitors, ovens and everything like that it becomes your entire home. It becomes your Jarvis. You don't actually have to spend 150 bucks or 200 bucks on an Alexa-enabled device or Google Home that most people may not be totally familiar with. But if you have a TV you're familiar with it. >> Obviously you mentioned Jarvis. That's reference to the old sitcom and when Mark Zuckerberg tried his Jarvis project which was, you know, wire his home from scratch. Although a science project, you talk about real utility. I mean so we're getting down to the consumerization so let's take that to the next level. >> Ken: Right. >> If you look at the trends in Silicon Valley it's certainly in the tech industry block, chain and ICOs are really hot. Mission point offerings. That's based on utility right? So, utility-based ICOs, so communities using gamification. Game apps, utility. Samsung, SmartThings. Using their intelligence to not just be the next Amazon. >> Right >> The commerce cloud company, they're just trying to be a better Samsung. >> Ken: Exactly. >> Which they've had some problems in the past and we've heard from analysts here Patrick Morgan was on, pointed out... Illustrated the point. They're a stovepipe company. And with Bixby 2.0 they're like breaking down the silos. We had the execs on here saying that's their goal. >> Ken: Exactly. Yeah if you look on here everything has been siloed. You look at a lot of tech companies now and you don't get to see their grand vision. Everyone has this proto-program when they start these companies and when they expand then you start to see everything come together. Like for example, whether it's Square, whether it's Apple, whether it's Google or Facebook, right? And Samsung, a storied history, right, they've been around for ages with a lot of great technology and they've got their hands in different parts. But from a consumer standpoint you're like likelihood of you having a Samsung device in your home is probably pretty good and so why not just expand that leverage that technology. Right now tech is all about AI. You start to see a lot of the AI stars get acquired or heavily funded and heavily invested. >> Really The Cube is AI, we're AI machine right here. Right here is the bot, analyst report. People are AI watching. But I mean what the hell is AI? AI is machine learning, using software, >> Data collection. >> Nailed it. >> And personalization. And you look at I interviewed a Samsung executive at CAS last year this January, and he was telling me about the three parts. It has to be personal, it has to be contextual and it has to be conversational in terms of AI. What you saw yesterday during the keynote and what executives and the companies have been repeatedly saying is that's what Bixby is. And you could kind of say that's similar to what Google has with Google Assistant you can see that with Alexa but it's still very... Those technologies are very silent. >> What were those three things again? Personal, >> Personable, contextual, and conversational. >> That is awesome, in fact, that connects with what Amy Joe Kim, CEO of ShuffleBrain. She took it from a different angle; she's building these game apps but she's becoming more of a product development. Because it's not just build a game like a Zynga game or you know, something on a mobile phone. She's bringing gaming systems. Her thesis was people are now part of the game. Now those are my words but, she's essentially saying the game system includes data from your friends. >> Right. >> The game might suck but my friends are still there. So there's still some social equity in there. You're bringing it over to the contextual personal, this is the new magic for app developers. Is this leading to AR? >> Oh absolutely. >> I mean we're talking about ... This is the convergence of the new formulas for successful app development. >> Right, I mean we were talking about earlier what is AI and I mentioned all about data and it's absolutely true. Your home is collecting so much data about you that it's going to offer that personal response. So you're talking about is this going to lead to AR? Absolutely, so whatever data it has about your home you might bring your phone out as you go shopping or whatnot. You might be out sight-seeing and have your camera out. And it might bring back some memories, right or might display a photo from your photo album or something. So there's a lot of interesting ties that could come into it and obviously Samsung's camera on their phones are one of the top ones on the market. So there's potential for it, yeah. >> Sorry Ken, I've got to ask you. So looking at the bigger picture now let's look outside of Samsung. We can look at some tell signs here Google on stage clearly not grand-standing but doing their thing. Android, you know, AR core, starting to see that Google DNA. Now they've got tensor flow and a lot of goodness happening in the cloud with Sam Ramji over there kicking ass at Google doing a great job. Okay, they're the big three, some people call it the big seven I call it the big three. It's Amazon, Microsoft, Google. Everyone else is fighting for four, five, six. Depending on who you want to talk to. But those are the three, what I call, native clouds. Ones that are going to be whole-saleing resource. Amazon is not Google, Amazon has no Android. They dropped their phones. Microsoft, Joe Belfiore said hey I'm done with phones they tapped out. So essentially Microsoft taps out of device. They've still got the Xbox. Amazon tapping out of phones. They've got commerce. They've got web service. They've got entertainment. This is going to be interesting. What's your take? >> Well interesting is an under-statement there. I mean, you look at what the ... Amazon, right now, is basically running the show when it comes to virtual assistant or voice-powered assistance. Alexa, Amazon launched a bunch of Alexa products recently and then soon after, I believe it was the last month, Google launches a whole bunch of Google home devices as well. But what's interesting is that both of those companies are targeting... Have a different approach to what Samsung is, right? Remember Samsung's with Bixby 2.0 is all about consolidating the home, right? In my post I coined that it was basically their fight to unite the internet of things kind of thing. But, you know, when it comes to Alexa with Amazon and Google they're targeting not only the smaller integrations with maybe like August or SmartLocks or thermostats and whatnot but they're also going after retailers and businesses. So how many skills can you have on Alexa? How many, what are they called, actions can you have on Google Home? They're going after businesses. >> Well this is the edge of the network so the reason why, again coming back full-circle, I was very critical on day one yesterday. I was kind of like, data IoT that's our wheelhouse in TheCUBE. Not a lot of messaging around that because I don't think Samsung is ready yet and nor should they be given their evolution. But in Amazon's world >> I think they're ... The way they played it yesterday was pretty good a little humble, like they didn't set that expectation like oh my god this is going to >> They didn't dismiss it but they were basically not highlighting it right. >> Well they did enough. They did enough to entice you to tease it but like, look, they have a long way to go to kind of unite it. SmartThings has been around for a while so they've been kind of building it behind the scenes. Now this is like hey now we're going to slap on AI. It's similar to ... >> What do you hear from developers? I've been hearing some chirping here about AI it's got to be standardized and not sure. >> Oh, absolutely. I think a lot of developers will probably want to see hey if I'm going to build... If I want to leverage AI and kind of consolidate I want to be able to have it to maximize my input maximize my reach. Like I don't want to have to build one action here one service skill here. Whatever Samsung's going to call for Bixby. You know I want to make it that one thing. But Samsung's whole modernization that's going to be interesting in terms of your marketplace. How does that play out? You know, Amazon has recently started to monetize or start to incentivize, as it were, developers. And Google if they're not already doing that will probably has plenty of experience in doing that. With Android and now they can do that with Google. >> So I've got to ask you about Facebook. Facebook has been rumored to have a phone coming but I mean Facebook's >> Ken: They tried that once. >> They're Licking their wounds right now. I mean the love on Facebook is not high. Fake news, platform inconsistencies. >> Ken: Ad issues. >> Moves fast, breaks stuff. Zuck is hurting. It's hurting Zuck. Certainly the Russian stuff. I think, first of all, it's really not Facebook's fault. They never claimed to be some original content machine. They just got taken advantage of through bad arbitrage. >> It's gets it to some scale. >> People are not happy with Facebook right now so it's hard for them to choose a phone. >> Well, you're right. There are rumors that they were going to introduce the phone again after... We all remember Facebook Home which was, you know, we won't talk about that anymore. But I think there was talk about them doing a speaker some sort of video thing. I think they were calling it... I believe it's called Project Aloha. I believe Business ETC. and TechCrunch have reported on that extensively. That is going to compete with what Amazon's going. So everyone is going after Amazon, right. So I think don't discount Samsung on this part I think they are going to be I don't want to call them the dark horse but you know, people are kind of ignoring them right now. >> Well if Samsung actually aligned with Amazon that would be very because they'd have their foot in both camps. Google and Amazon. Just play Switzerland and win on both sides. >> Samsung, I think Samsung >> That might be a vital strategy. Kinesis if the customers wanted to do that. Google can provide some cloud for them, don't know how they feel about that. >> Yeah I mean Samsung will definitely be... I think has the appeal with their history they can go after the bigger retailers. The bigger manufacturers to leverage them because there's some stability as opposed to well I'm not going to give access to my data to Amazon you look at Amazon now as Amazon's one of the probably the de facto leader in that space. You see people teaming up with Google to compete against them. You know, there's a anti-Amazony type of alliance out there. >> Well I would say there's a jealousy factor. >> Ken: True, true. >> But a lot of the fud going out there... I saw Matt Asay's article in InfoWorld... And it was over the top basically saying that Amazon's not giving back an open source. I challenged Andy Jesse two years ago on that and Matt's behind the times. Matt you've got to get with the program you're a little bit hardcore pushed there. But I think he's echoing the fear of the community. Amazon's definitely doing open source first of all but the same thing goes for Ali Baba. I asked the founder of Ali Baba cloud last week when I was in China. You guys are taking open source what are you giving back and it was off the record comment and he was like, you know, they want to give back. So, just all kinds of political and or incumbent positions on open source, that to me is going to be the game-changer. Linux foundation, Hipatchi is growing, exponential growth in open source over the next five to ten years. Just in terms of lines of code shipped. >> Right. >> Linux foundation's shown those numbers and 10% of that code is going to be new. 90% of the code's going to be re-used and so forth. >> Ken: Oh absolutely. I mean you're going to need to have a lot of open source in order for this eco-system to really flourish. To build it on your own and build it proprietary it basically locks it down. Didn't Sony deal with that when they were doing, like, they're own memory cards for cameras and stuff and now their cameras are using SD cards now. So you're starting to see, I think, a lot of companies will need to be supportive of open source. In tech you start to see people boasting that, you know, we are doing this in open source. Or you know, Facebook constantly announces hey we are releasing this into open source. LinkedIn will do that. Any company that you talk to will... >> Except Apple. Apple does some open source. >> Apple does some open source, yeah. >> But they're a closed system and they are cool about it. They're up front it. Okay final question, bottom line, Samsung Developer Conference 2017 what should people know that didn't make it or are watching this, what should they know about what they missed and what Samsung's doing, what they need to do better. >> You know I think what really took the two-day conference is basically Bixby. You look at all the sessions; all about Bixby. SmartThings, sure they consolidated everything into the SmartThings cloud, great. But you know SmartThings has been around for a while and I'm interested to see how well they've been doing. I wish they released a little bit more numbers on those. But Bixby it was kind of an interesting 10 million users on them after three months launching in the US which is very is a pretty good number but they still have a bit of a ways to go and they're constantly making improvements which is a very good, good, good thing as well. >> Ken Yeoung, a friend of TheCUBE, tech reporter formerly with VentureBeat now onto his next thing what are you going to do? Take some time off? >> Take some time off, continue writing about what I see and who knows where that takes me. >> Yeah and it's good to get decompressed, you know, log off for a week or so. I went to China I was kind of off Facebook for a week. It felt great. >> Yeah. (laughs) >> No more political posts. One more Colin Kaepernick kneeling down during the national anthem or one more anti-Trump post I'm going to... It was just disaster and then the whole #MeToo thing hit and oh my god it was just so much hate. A lot of good things happening though in the world and it's good to see you writing out there. It's TheCUBE, I'm John Furrier, live in San Francisco, Samsung Developer Conference exclusive Cube coverage live here we'll be right back with more day two coverage of two days. We'll be right back.