 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Adobe Summit 2019, brought to you by Adobe. Hello everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage here in Las Vegas for Adobe Summit 2019. I'm John Furrier, Jeff Frick. Our next guest is Jason Woosley, Vice President of Commerce, Product and Platform for Adobe. Part of the big keynote display this morning, a news on the announcement of the commerce cloud, formerly Magento. Congratulations, welcome to theCUBE. Hey, thanks so much for having me, it's great to be here. Love the commerce angle because now, that's a big part of a journey, people buy stuff. Absolutely, that's the most important, one of the most important parts. Well, when you think about an experience end to end, right? I mean, it culminates, hopefully, in a transaction. And that's one of the pieces that makes, you know, the Magento acquisition fits so well into the Adobe family. We actually kind of finished that last mile of the transaction, getting to actual ownership. You know, I love this event because it feels a little like Woodstock as Steve Lucas said on stage, because you got the best of big data, all the intoxicating kind of conversations and discussions. You got the best of cloud, all the geek stuff under the hood, and then you got the applications which are super relevant. So it's really kind of, I love the content, love you guys are in the middle of a, I think a great wave of innovation coming. But if you look at the big picture, you're seeing the same kind of themes, latency, relevance. I mean, these are tech terms used on your product and commerce. A lot different than other things. So you start to see these geek terms kind of weaving into this new cloud. I think you're really starting to see a convergence of some of this terminology and what really matters and that's the customer experience, right? It's really about answering what the customer wants. And getting to that is, you know, that's the magic. And it's accepting the fact that it's a disjointed journey. I love the journey conversation, but it's not the straight pipe like it used to be. You're in and out, you know, you're looking on a website, you're jumping over from a tweet, you know, there's so many kinds of ins and outs, ins and outs, ins and outs before you get to that buy. And consumers are so sophisticated now, right? I mean, they absolutely take advantage of all of those channels. And that's why it's so important for, you know, merchants that are trying to be relevant, you've got to be present at every point where your customers are. And it's a tough thing to do because there's just a proliferation of channels. I mean, you know, we've got digital kiosk, we've got buy online pickup in store, all these omni-channel operations coming together now. So it becomes even more important for merchants to make that investment and make sure that not only are they at the place where their customers are, but they're there with a relevant and personalized message. Jayce, I got to ask you the question. I bring this up a lot when we have these kind of user experience kind of conversations. It's, you know, when you have new things coming on the market that are hard to operationalize out of the gate, take some time. We started to see that with you guys that built the platform, people are starting to operationalize new capabilities. But on the consumer side, the user side, expectations become the new experience, kind of a cliche in the tech world. What are some of those experiences that you're seeing that's becoming the new experience? To your point about the old way, I can smell a marketing funnel a mile away, I'm trying to buy something and all this other distractions that are not relevant to me are there. So you start to see some frustration, but now users expect something new. What is that expectation that's converting into experience? It's across the board and expectations are sky high, right? And it seems like every time we see something innovative, you think about Amazon Prime, right? Two-day shipping, that was crazy back in the day. And now, two-day shipping is considered standard shipping. If you want to be fast, you're doing same day. And that kind of, it is so hard to keep up with that pace of innovation. And it happens all over the place, right? It's not just in logistics, people are expecting to be able to take advantage of omnichannel operations, right? Millennials especially, 60% of them really, really prefer to be able to have a tangible interaction with the product before they buy it, but they still want to buy online. So now they do buy online, pick up in store, click and collect as they call it in Europe. And it's just become a huge fad. We've seen a 250% increase of the largest retailers of buy online, pick up in store just in the last year. Absolutely crazy. It's pretty wild when Best Buy gets on stage and says we're not a brick and mortar retailer. Yeah, it actually changes the game, right? What else is interesting though is that these brick and mortar retailers that have an online presence, they actually have a distinct advantage because of that kind of tangibility, right? You've got the opportunity to do all of your shopping online, but you've also got a great place to go do showcasing and actually interact with some of those, especially more high tech tools. Right. You guys been out front on the Magento side. We covered your event last year for the acquisition and a couple of things popped out of me that I want to get your reaction to now. One is obviously the role of the community, but as you started getting into the cloud kind of play the economics are changing too, right? So you have community, economics, and then large scale. These are new table stakes. So what's your reaction to that? How is Adobe and how are your customers adjusting to this kind of new normal? Your thoughts on this shift? Yeah, I think they adjust faster than we expect them to. It's really interesting because as you see these demands for things like cloud operations, right? I mean, really that's taking a whole set of responsibilities away from the merchant and allowing a vendor, a single vendor to just provide that as a service. And we're seeing that again and again, right? The service-based economy that's just becoming much, much more prevalent. What it means for our community, and I'm glad you brought that up because our commerce community is the largest in the world. It's highly engaged. We have a tremendous amount of participation from those guys. And they're actually helping lead the way. They help merchants feel good about adopting new technologies. They're also incredibly innovative. And they take our product and do things that we would have never thought of. Right, great product feedback too. The developer is a great nice flywheel. It is a great flywheel. Great use case. Congratulations. You guys have done some great work there. Thanks. And Adobe's certainly going to get the benefits of that. The other question I want to ask you is something that I noticed on digital over the years is that, and it's gotten more prevalent now that everyone's connected. You know, the old days of buying tech, oh, let's buy this great project. We'll build it out and multiple year payback and everyone nerds out. It's like a project. And they have fun doing it, doing it, right? And then like, what was the value? When the value today is about money. When people lose money, the friction, all those other kind of coolness, the shiny new toy, it goes away. Yeah, it falls away. You're in the middle of that. You see more of that now. People whose businesses are on the line, whether it's a security breach or revenue. The optimization around the noise just goes right through the problem, right there. So, you know, the very best way to tackle that is in an iterative, you know, experimental way, right? You've got to be able to make small bets, learn from those bets and then pivot. This concept that we can take an idea, go into our back rooms and code it for three years and come back out with something that meets the market, it's a fallacy. It's never going to work, right? So you've got to start delivering shippable increments much faster, smaller pieces, and then make sure that you've got that feedback loop closed so that you can actually respond to your customers. Right. The other piece, which you just talked about briefly, but I want to unpack it in reference to what you just said, two big words, open source and ecosystem. And as you said, you can't just go in the back room, even if you knew the product, you can't necessarily go in the back room and build it yourself. You know, fundamentally believe that not all the experts are in your four walls and that there's a, by rule, there's a lot more outside and leveraging that capability is really a game changer. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we have 300,000 developers that call themselves Magento engineers and don't take a paycheck from Adobe. It's phenomenal what they're able to do. And they help us move very, very quickly, right? We saw last year when the Amazon patent expired for one click checkout. On the day that it expired, one of our community members created a pull request that made every Magento store able to take advantage of it. They are probably waiting right there for the clock. It's like, yeah. Oh no, they were waiting, they were waiting. Because the licensing fees were extortion. Right, right. That's innovation. It is. That's an example of community driven innovation. And that's, it's a great place to go get that, right? I mean, you can, within your four walls, you've got lots of expertise, but you always end up with some blinders on, right? We've got, you know, profit margins to go chase. We've got all kinds of good business things to go do. The community, however, completely unfettered, right? They've got the ability to go try all kinds of cool stuff. Two questions on that thread. One is community. A lot of people don't try the buzzword. Hey, let's get a community. You can't buy a community, you got to earn it. So talk about that dynamic. And then talk about how Adobe's reacted to the Magento's community. Because Adobe's pretty open. Yeah. They are creative. I don't think they would be anti-community. They had developers, they got a bunch of community themselves. So community, buying a community versus earning it, and then the impact of Magento's community to Adobe. You cannot buy it. 100%, you cannot buy a community. And you have to, you have to deserve it. And really, you have to think about yourselves as custodians of a community, rather than, you know, we're members, right? When we used to have this saying that we are Magento, everybody inside Magento, in the ecosystem, our partners, our developers, everybody is part of that solution. So, you know, trying to own it, trying to exert control over it, it's a recipe for not having it at all, right? So you have to be very cautious. And it really is, it is a custodianship. It's an honor and it's a privilege and you have to kind of take it seriously. If you get it right, the benefits are multi-fold. That's exactly right. Now, Adobe, how are they, we're obviously there, we heard that, and we see that they're open to that and working with it, and what so? Adobe has been terrific. And it was, I think, one of the biggest fears from our community as, you know, acquisition unfolded was, you know, hey, Adobe, big corporate company, not a lot of open source projects. They've got, you know, they've got some, but that, you know, their core isn't about open source and what was going to happen to our community as we came in. It's been absolutely terrific because Adobe has been absolutely investing and making sure that we continue to be terrific custodians of this community. And in fact, they're trying now to expand that community to the rest of their products. They would love to have, you know, our community members that are able to go out and innovate so rapidly, do so across the entire Adobe portfolio. It's interesting too, if you have a platform play in the cloud scale and some of these cross-functional kind of connection tissue points, that's recipe for robust ecosystem development because that means as white spaces, opportunities to build on top of, that's a platform. Right, and you will see innovation and ingenuity from that, but you'll never ever expect, right? It's just, it's phenomenal. Jay, so I'm curious to get your take on a specific feature I want to dive into, which is dynamic pricing, right? Well, Tails have been doing dynamic pricing forever. Yep. Authorization to the kid working at the front counter, if it's 11 o'clock, you got an open room, take whatever walks in the door. Yep. To the airlines, got very sophisticated, but most companies haven't really been able to execute dynamic pricing. Just curious, when you bring in kind of the capabilities that you get now with the Adobe suite and the data now that you have around the customer and the data that you now have around the context, I mean, are we going to see much better execution of things like dynamic pricing? We're going to see democratization a lot of those things that were typically reserved to the very, very big industries, right? I think you're looking at airlines, right? They did a great job, but they invested hundreds of millions of dollars in the systems to go do that. Now, with things like Sensei and artificial intelligence, our machine learning capabilities, we can actually bring those capabilities to small merchants and kind of everyday folks to go out and do those experiments with your pricing and understand where you have elasticity and where you don't. Once you have that information, you're making much better decisions across the board for your business. And that's actually the benefits of, again, the platform and scale that you have. So the question is, as you guys continue to get this cloud scale going, what are some of the platform priorities for you guys? What product areas are you looking at? What white spaces are going to lead for the ecosystem? Can you share a little bit of insight into what you guys are thinking? Yeah, I mean, one, we try to open everything to the ecosystem. There's really not a lot of advantage for us to have anything that's super closed off and secret sauce. We try to make sure that everything is available. And so what you'll see is investments in things like SDKs, right? An SDK, a software development kit, basically lets you use any language, any tool that you're comfortable with to go ahead and integrate, extend, and contribute to our core capabilities. So you'll see us continue to invest in making sure that everybody that wants to participate has a very, very easy path to do so. And in terms of the developer program, Mission SDK, what's your impression of that? Can you give an update? We're not really familiar with it much. We're learning Adobe. What do you guys have for developer programs within Adobe? Well, I mean, so it is terrific. We have a project called Adobe.io that actually does a terrific job of sort of standardizing the API and interfaces between all of the different components within the digital experience suite. So you'll continue to see us invest in that. I mean, certainly commerce is going to start participating in that Adobe.io model and that's going to make it even more broadly available to these great folks. One of the things we had on theCUBE today was a historic moment. We've been doing this for 10 years, hundreds of shows a year. We had our first guest on, one of your customers from MetLife. His title was Marketing CIO. And I'm like, okay, he's part of the global technology and operations team of MetLife. But I think the bigger story there is that this, we think will be a bigger trend than just a one-off. We think we're seeing the connection between the IT world, data, developers, applications coming together where marketing is like a CIO. And it's exactly right. I mean, we look at the CMO and the CIO as kind of two sides of the same coin. And more often than not, they have the same objectives. They're coming at it from a slightly different perspective. And so you really do end up having to marry the message so that it resonates not only with the IT folks and usually that's about cloud processes, ease of use, ease of deployment, low cost to operation. And then on the marketing side, it's really about feature availability and visual merchandising and being able to bring their great products to life. And the interesting quote he said, I said, what's it like to be a marketing CIO share to others who might want to be there? He goes, well, I'm kind of a matchmaker and a translator. I think that's a pretty good way to put it. Yeah, that makes good sense. He put projects together, translating jargon to business benefits, but the emphasis was on the business. You got to know the business. We had Dollar Shave Club on earlier, another one of your Adobe's customers. They're like, no, we know the business. It's about the data, the data processing, the data systems, business, it has to be blended. It's the art and science of business and technology. Yep, and you only get that right when you put the customer right in the middle, right? You have to build all of those business processes and all of those systems around what that customer is looking for. So I'm just curious, Jason, what's changed over the last couple of years? Cause we've been talking about the 360 view of the customer since, I don't know when, but a while, right? And we've been talking about Omni-Channel, Omni-Channel marketing and touching the customer for a while. But it seems like we've hit a tipping point. Maybe I'm misreading the tea leaves, but what are the kind of critical factors that are making that much more reality than just talk like it was a couple of years back? Well, I mean, I think so on Omni-Channel, we're certainly seeing a maturity of an understanding of what it takes to do Omni-Channel. It's not just a commerce operation. Omni-Channel actually stretches back into your supply chain, you know, to be able to really think about the way you deliver to customers as a single channel, your supply chain has to be highly flexible, right? Your logistics capabilities have to be extremely flexible and they have to be able to be tuned for the things that are important to your customers, either speed of delivery or cost of delivery, all of those kinds of things. So in the Omni-Channel space, I think we're finally starting to see the maturity of, okay, how do we make these things real? And that's critically important. The 360, 360 view of the customer. 360 view of the customer, almost the same thing there, right? Where we're finally seeing the technology start to catch up. And the big challenge there was you always had one view or the other. You either had a behavioral view of your customer, how they interact with your content, or you had this great transactional view, the dollars and cents behind the relationship. Now we're starting to see companies, especially like Adobe, that have made these incredible investments to bring those two houses of data together and that really starts to tell the full story. Again, going back to that customer journey, you need to be able to observe that entire journey in order to make those kinds of decisions. Jason, I wish we had more time. I want to get one more question. I know where you want to break here, but maybe we can follow up as a separate conversation in Palo Alto. You know, having a digital footprint. You hear that buzzword a lot. Get a digital footprint out there. It makes a lot of sense. But a world that has been dominated by silos. It's hard to have a footprint when you have siloed entities. So in your mind, your reaction between something that's foundational and then data siloed, data silos could be okay at the app level, but what's the foundational footprint? I mean, foundation is everything. Without a foundation, you really can't build on. Yeah, and we talked a little bit about the Adobe Experience platform this morning. You heard Shantanu and Anjul come on and talk about, you know, we've got this amazing capability now to really take that data, standardize it, and make it available for all kinds of systems and processes. And I think that's where you're going to see it. The real foundation for, you know, all of these siloed efforts is going to be in this kind of common data understanding, what they call an XDM. And customers got silos too. They got agencies, all kinds of things out there. Absolutely. Comes the data everywhere. Jason, thanks for coming on. Really appreciate it. Hey guys, I appreciate it. Thanks so much. I'm going to buy off. All right, Jason Woosley on theCUBE here at Adobe Summit 2019. I'm John Furrier. Day one of two days of wall-to-wall live coverage. Stay with us for more coverage after this short break.