(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)