(energetic music) >> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas. It's theCUBE, covering Magento Imagine 2019, brought to you by Adobe. >> Hey, welcome back to theCUBE. Lisa Martin with Jeff Frick in Las Vegas at The Wynn, for Magento Imagine 2019. We're excited to welcome to theCUBE T.J. Gamble. Not only the CEO of Jamersan, but a Magento Master. >> That's the big one right there. >> Right? >> CEO's important, but don't forget that one. >> Well, one of the things I wish our audience could see, is that awesome orange cape that you and the other Masters were wearing this morning. >> If I had had known, I'd have brought the cape, but the cape's going to get framed and put up somewhere, so we tucked that away in the bag. (laughs) >> So you have been a Magento advocate, part of this massive community of over 300 000 that they have accumulated in the years. For a long time now, this is the first Imagine post-Adobe acquisition. What is your take on this year's event? How is this community, in the year since the acquisition was announced? >> You know, the community is a little apprehensive, a little concerned. Change is always a concern for people. You know things are going so well, Magento's growing. Everything is positive forward, and then you have Adobe come in and acquire it. Some people, they're on edge a little bit, but I think you come to conferences like this, and you see the announcement of them rolling Sensei into it, and channels, you know the Amazon channels they rolling in, and you start to see the acceleration of features and innovation that Adobe brings when they bring those level of resources. And so, I think people are starting to really, kinda, get over that nervousness and start to feel the excitement of where the platform is going, and it's just about to explode, and get even bigger. >> It's a whole bunch of resources, right? The new investment, and as you've seen it kinda change hands a couple times: isn't it a pitted company, then going to eBay, then out of eBay, private equity, and now to Adobe, and yet the community has been very , very grounded and stuck with the platform all the way around. Opensource is a huge part of this story, small, medium-sized business is a huge part of this story. There's some really big announcements today, kind of integrating into the Amazon ecommerce system, integrating into the Google shopping systems, and I still can't believe that Adobe didn't have an ecommerce platform, before they brought a Magento. It fits perfectly into this kind of funnel process. >> It could not fit any better if they had built it up from the ground themselves. You know, if you've didn't see at least the promise of it right away, then maybe you weren't paying attention. It fits into what Adobe's doing just incredibly, because Adobe's all about experience, and so Magento being the most flexible e-commerce platform in the world, it does not have the limits that some of the other platforms have. So if you can envision it, if your customers desire it, you can deliver it on the Magento platform, which is what made it just-- I mean, it's like you say, it's just the perfect fit into the Adobe ecosystem. And I don't know why they didn't have an ecommerce platform. I don't know if they've tried and failed. I didn't keep up with the history of Adobe like I have Magento, but I'm glad we're here. I'm glad it worked out that way, because it's gonna be good for everybody. >> What are some of the things that you're hearing from those small and medium businesses, as Jeff was mentioning this morning, the announcement of the Amazon sales channel integration with the free extensions in the marketplace, Google shopping, aimed at squashing the fears of some of those small and medium-sized businesses may have had in the last year of being acquired by a company, Adobe, that has a very strong and oquias presence? >> Yeah, it's not so much those features are-- it's you're starting to see the investments, so that's good, but those features are more about ecommerce is getting more complicated. You're going to have to start selling in multiple channels, you're going to have to start selling on all of the social platforms. Facebook's gonna eventually roll something out. They're already doing it with WhatsApp. Instagram just announced the check-out within their site. So there's a lot of things you've got to manage, and data is difficult, so anytime a platform can out-of-the-box handle a lot of those integrations, you can now manage Amazon, you can now manage your Google products, widen your ecommerce platform, and it becomes the hub for small merchants to run their business, because most small merchants don't have a complex ERP as their hub for their data, so they can-- >> A lot of resources, right? >> Exactly, so if the ecom platform can help you manage that data, so you can focus on properly merchandising, that's great for everybody, because small merchants, the have and the have nots: the gap is widening, and so small merchants are going to have to have tools that they can leverage to keep up, because they're never going to be able to throw the money at it like somebody else can. I mean Amazon is spending eight hundred million dollars next quarter Three months, they're spending eight million hundred dollars to go from two day prime to one day prime. How is anybody supposed to keep up with that? You can't, so you compete on your own turf, but you still need tools so that you can leverage all of the available things out there, all of the available channels and stuff, that you can go out and bring ecommerce to your customers, instead of forwarding customers to your ecommerce. >> It's a great example, bringing it to the customers. I'm curious to get, kind of your take, on the small, medium ecommerce players out there, that's kind of experienced message, right? It's a big piece of the Adobe story. We were at Adobe's summit a couple weeks back, and clearly they've got a ton of resources. When they talk about this ongoing engagement with the client, be with them wherever they are, let them shop wherever they are. Like you say, that's easy if you've got a lot of resources, but I'm curious: are smaller merchants seeing that? Are they changing their way? Do they go to market where it is more of an experience, and the products come along, or a lot of them, that's just too big for them to bite? >> Both. You see both. It depends on the maturity of the merchant, what kind of resources they actually have to dedicate to it. The great thing about experience is, is once you have a platform with limitations, like an Instagram check out, that is an experience. Instagram handles the experience for you, so somebody finds a product, they one-click, and they've ordered that product, and all of the canceling that order, all of the notifications go through that platform, so they've made that very easy for a merchant to have that top-level experience. You know, if you're a small Mom-and pop, and you gain access to Instagram checkout, it's gonna be the exact same experience as the big brands that have access to it. As long as you understand your audience, and you're creating posts to engage with them, and you know how to merchandise your products, you don't have to worry about the technology stack. So I think this is going to be the great equalizer with where merchants are actually interacting with their customers. It's going to be a huge opportunity. >> What about, kind of, the competition with somebody, like an Amazon, where on one hand it's a great distribution channel for me as a small merchant. I got some specialty items-- I used to always joke, "Good news, just got an order from Walmart. Bad news is you just got an order from Walmart", right? So, you've got the scale issues, as you mentioned in Instagram. Suddenly I turn on Instagram, and my cup goes viral. How are small merchants kinda playing both sides of that coin: I wanna play with Amazon. I want to use their distribution technology, I wanna use Instagram with to pay. At the same time, I've got limited resources. Oh my God. One of these things hit and I get 100 000 orders pop up on my system tomorrow, I'm in trouble. How are people managing that? How are you helping them, kind of, strategise? >> You want to find the right tools. You need to understand your customers. You need to understand where to best engage them, and if you have limited resources, you have to be selective. You have to figure out which one is the best, like if I have all my customers on Instagram, then that makes sense, but if all my customers are on Twitter, then why am I putting resources into Instagram? So you figure out which platform is best. When it comes to Amazon, not to quote-- we don't want to quote 90s rap on here, but in the words of the Immortal Too $hort, "You should be getting it while the gettin's good". Take advantage of it while it's there, but sooner or later they're going to own your market. You understand that, you go in with eyes wide open, that sooner or later if you're successful, Amazon is going to take over your market share that you're getting from their platform. But until that happens, you have no choice but to play by their rules. These other platforms, it's a little different, because Amazon's dangerous because they own the channel, the actual medium and the platform by which transactions are happening, but they're also a competitor on that platform, which is what makes them dangerous. When you get in that situation, there just so many gray areas. We've never been in that situation before. The good thing about these other social channels, is that they're the medium but they're not also competing. Like Instagram is not selling on their platform, so it's-- somethings going to happen with Amazon. Every Juggernaut dies at some point. We maybe a 100 years from now before we see that happen, but, you know, something's gonna have to happen to stop Amazon. We can't have one platform, that is also a competitor in the space be 75, 80, 90% of all ecoomerce. We just can't have it, so something's going to happen between now and when we get there. I'm not the guide, I'm not Nostradarmus, I'm not going to prognosticate what that is, but changes are gonna happen over the next five years, because that's just not a market conducive to competition. >> Speaking of changes, there's a lot of change going on with the expectation of consumers, which we are every day, for many products and services, and we wanna have a personalized experience. We also want to be able to do everything from our smartphone, so this rise of, at least it's starting a transactional buying process on mobile is really critical. One of the things also announced today was progressive web apps. Want to get your perspective on that as a game changer in the next gen for shopping, and how might that enable a small to medium business to compete better with its competitors on Amazon itself? >> Yeah, PWA is if you don't know what a progressive web app is, you need to go do research right now. It was-- they definitely mentioned it today. It wasn't necessarily announced. It was announced, I wanna say, a year and a half, two years ago now. They've been working on PWA Studio in Magento for a while. Progressive web apps are a Google initiative, and Google usually gets what it wants. We won't talk too much about Accelerated Mobile Pages, or anything like that, but usually if Google's pushing it, it's a good thing. PWAs are interesting, because they're not a technology. They're a methodology. It's like responsive web design. It is just best practices for how you should deliver a mobile experience. It's a single page application, which means you load your app once, and then elements-- when you're moving through your site, elements that are the same don't refresh. Like if the navigation, the headers the same, when you click, it's still there. It doesn't flicker, it doesn't jump, it lazy loads things in, so it brings things in as it needs it, to save time, so that it loads faster, and to save data, because mobile usually you're on a cell network when you're doing that. It touches on all of the important aspects of ecommerce, which is why it's coming fast. Number one, you're gonna have increased conversions, because if you can browse around the website, and it's snappy, and it's fast, you're much more likely to order something. So you've got increased conversions there, that's number one. Number two, you're gonna get more traffic, because it's a Google initiative, Google rewards fast websites. So if you do it properly, and you've got the SEO right, Google's going to send you more traffic, and so it also leads to more loyalty, because you can have a more pleasant user experience, and your customers like you. Really in ecommerce there's really only three stats that really matter when it comes to how much money you're taking in: how many new customers can you get-- right, that goes back to the conversion rates, and Google sending you stuff-- how much did they order, were they more likely to order more when it's fast, and they go right through and they can browse through 1000 products really quickly, and then how frequently do they order from you? That's it. Every other stat in ecommerce trickles down to those, and PWA touches on all three of those, which is what's going to make it happen and happen really fast. Right now, if you move into PWA, it's a little bit of a risk, a little bit. That risk lowers every day, so if you watching this, two months from now the risk is a lot lower, but the technology is new, the tooling is a little new. It still needs to mature a little bit to be readliy available for the masses and affordable, especially for smaller merchants, but if you do move now, you can have a serious competitive advantage for years. If you're building a website right now, you 100% need to at least look into PWAs. If you're gonna launch it, later this year, you're gonna launch it early next year, you absolutely have to look at it, and if you're going to start the website next year some time, I really-- it's going to be an odd case that launches a website by summer of next year, or after, that is not a progressive web app. It's gonna be that fast. >> T.J. I wanna get your perspective on something else that we're talking about here at the show, and that's AI. You know, talk about AI, and machine learning for a long time, and as we kinda suspected, really the easy application flows are inside somebody else's application. We're seeing Adobe use AI on the back-end or on the marketing side, 'cause the whole idea is to get you what you want, and as somebody once said "If it's done poorly, it's creepy. If it's done well, it's magic". So I wonder if you can kind of reflect on how AI is changing what you can build, amd what you can deliver to the customer, even if you're an SMB, 'cause you're leveraging AI back in systems, way back supporting it. >> Yeah, the AI is a buzz term right now, and buzz terms are always really popular about five years before they're useful, and we're probably a couple of years into AI really being a huge buzz term, so it's starting to creep down market. With something like SenSei being added to Magento, you're going to see it creep even further down market. I'm excited about it. What AI in ecommerce-- where it's really going to play is understanding your customers in real time. Those who understand their customers, can provide a better experience. And how do you understand your customer, the differences between them, what they're looking for in real-time, while they're interacting with your website, that's really difficult to do, and it's impossible to do without something like artificial intelligence, so leveraging it for your product recommendations, for your search, for what content you're going to show to them. It's still going to be a lot of work, unless we figure out how to AI create all that content. Still going to be a lot of work, but just having the ability to understand the subtle nuances and differences between your customers and their desires, and then to be able to actually react to those in real time, is going to be incredible. >> Especially as there is not only so much noise out there, but there's so much competition, pretty much every product and service. T.J. we thank you so much for joining us on theCUBE this afternoon. Next time you gotta come back with your orange-- >> I'll bring the cape. >> Magento Imagine cape. >> If they would have just told me, I'd have brought it, but-- >> Now you have to come back. >> Now I've got an excuse. I'll forget it next time so I have to come back again. >> There you go! (laughs) Allright T.J. thank you so much for joining us. >> Thank you. We appreciate your insights. For Jeff Frick, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from Las Vegas, Magento Imagine 2019. Thanks for watching. (energetic music)