 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 of Adobe Summit 2019. Here for two days, I'm John Furrier, Jeff Frick. Our next guest is Mark Lenhard, SVP of Growth. Part of the big news is the Adobe Commerce Cloud, Mark formerly with Magento now. Adobe, great to see you, thanks for coming on. Thanks for having me, it's a real pleasure to be here. So very impressive Adobe with their creative products and their end user applications. Really great stuff, people know it. It's a cloud service, the transformations happened. But what's really happening too is this platform continues to get built. You guys with Magento, one of the big pieces of the puzzle. Marketo's got a big piece over there. You guys are a big part of the Commerce Cloud. Big news here. What's the Commerce Cloud about? You guys announced it here at the show. When is it going to be available? What's the features? What's it do? Give us the overview. No, great, and again, thanks for having me. It's really been a wild year with the Magento acquisition coming in, really folding into a suite of products on the experience side that really are designed to really help companies transform themselves 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 with Adobe Commerce Cloud is the opportunity which available now for our larger merchants and enterprises to get the core Magento platform, which our customers know and love, but get that in a way that's managed by Adobe, is more fully integrated into the other products and services so you can deliver that full customer end-to-end journey. And with some enhanced features, which will happen over time, particularly as we get to more data-driven insights and over time sensei and AI-powered tools. You know, I love looking at slides because you can tell a lot by a slide, right? When the lay them out, these keynotes, actually kind of architecture slides. What I think is interesting about the Adobe Experience Cloud is it lays out nicely because you have cloud modules if you will, or building blocks. You've got the ad cloud, the analytics cloud, the marketing cloud, and the commerce cloud. And you've got platform underneath enabling that. So a lot of nice decoupled but cohesive elements to it, which really is a testament to kind of how they're laying out that experience cloud and experience. What is the commerce cloud's role in that? Because you guys have to be highly cohesive to do the kind of levels of commerce that's demanded in B2B now. It's changing to more like a direct-to-consumer business model, so it's a consumer-like marketing function in a B2B context. How is that changing what Magento was and what's it turning into as the commerce cloud, specifically? Well, you know, a lot of it is just really leveraging a lot of the features and functionality that Magento had. It really just fit in really, really nicely into that user journey, right? And so where Magento is really slotting in nicely is in that buy section, right? If you've got discovery, buy to renew, buy all the way through to renew, Magento and the core platform there really helps deliver that so that our customers, whether they're B2B or B2C 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 to Magento, enable them to transact and then actually renew and do everything from digital products to consumer or to physical goods. It's interesting, you look at the slides too, it feels like an operating environment, right? Because you've got cloud, you guys are on cloud. There's a lot of touch points with other pieces of the system, it's an operating system basically, not most, not technically, but a platform. You've got to put some platform, you've got to talk to things, so data I can imagine is critical. If you want to do that journey, and you're a big part of the buy piece, you've got to talk to 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, they're data-centric, data's super important, we heard that in the keynote. What's the role of data in all this and how do you see that? So it's absolutely critical as you mentioned and 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 up front, I know what you're doing on a website, I know what you're doing on Instagram, other platforms to, I know what you're transacting, I know what you're buying, to I know what you're renewing on and what you're coming back to do. 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, or sorry, take that data and develop insights out of it and then most importantly take action on it. And 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, we know e-commerce really well whether it's B2B or B2C, 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 can take action. Mark, what I thought was kind of interesting 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, what's so important is that a transaction is just one piece of a much broader experience, right, is the word, really of an 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 are all about the transactions, it's funny, it's weird it didn't happen earlier. Adobe's all about the creative and 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 to have multiple transactions and multiple experiences that support each other as opposed to being really standalone. No, that's, I think I agree with that. I mean, the transaction's obviously really important to our customers and to us. You definitely want it, and it's necessary. I can't remember the word that he's in the keynote, right? It's definitely important, but it's not the pinnable kind of goal. 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, the digital or physical that they're making, but it includes all the way up to that experience, all the content they see before then, how they experience the brand before then, and then likewise, after the transaction, right? How does the brand follow up and interact with the customer afterwards? Most of our merchants, all of our merchants, all of our brands are looking to have lifelong relationships with customers, and so that entire end-to-end experience is important. Mark, talk about the community aspect. We covered your show, Magenta, before the acquisition last year. The queue was there. We were, I was very impressed. I had no idea the depth of community that you had in that company. When you guys came over, what was the feedback? What's the result? What's the plan? Can you share some update on impact of the community and the role of the community for the Commerce Cloud? Absolutely. I mean, the community for us is near and dear. I mean, it is the core of who Magento is and was, and is transferred over now to Adobe. You probably heard this morning, Shantanu talking about how important, as soon as you got out on stage, how important community was. The Magento community, but the broader now, Adobe community. We've got about 375,000 community members. These include developers, partners that are really core to the functionality. About 50% of our code is developed by the community and developers in the community that submit that code back to us, and they're the lifeblood of how we grow and support the business going forward. So what's the fit between Adobe and Magenta? Because you mentioned something that's, might be kind of a nuanced point. You have very community, a lot of open source, you've got a co-creation on the product side. Adobe's a creative entity. Talk about the fit between your culture of Magento and the Adobe culture and where they are today and where they're going. No, there's absolutely some overlap in our community and a lot of our partners are out helping our merchants create content, right? Create that brand experience and they leverage the creative side, right? And the products and the suite of services that the creative side of the house provides and then that feeds in directly into driving awareness and marketing and sales. So a lot of overlap there. Growth question for you or kind of more of an operational question. You know, in any major shifts, certainly cloud, we've seen that, it's here for a long time, but as you start to see new apps and new kinds of business models emerge that are continuing to transform, operationalizing new things is very difficult for an enterprise or a business. And it's sometimes culture, sometimes it's tech IT, sometimes it's just dealing on know what the new environment's like, tools and technology. So getting something operationalized that's a game changer is hard. How do you look at that? How do you guys approach that market and go to market on how you guys deal with the marketing mix? What are some of the things that you do to take something that's new and new capability and operationalize it for a customer? Yeah, there's a couple of things. One is the culture at which you develop, right? So the people, and really working to train and develop a culture and hire the right talent that is, quite frankly, just open to change, right? That you've got to be agile, because I could come in here and tell you five things you've got to do today. Tomorrow, it'll be totally different, right? And so you've got to be agile and build that culture of agility. The 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, Sean said you did a great job this morning kind of showing the dashboards that we use internally. And that was through a lot of work and a lot of process to get that, but we had to simplify it down into what are the key metrics that you really need to watch? And I'd say that's the third thing is you've got to follow data. You've got to be data-driven and develop insights out of that data, because things are too fast, moving too quickly, to have years to develop a gut reaction to it, right? You've got to see the data and you've got to see it when it happens in real time. And moving fast, gut's good, but you're going to apply that to data as well, so this is key. So how about the- If you've got the right platform, and we're trying to develop very real-time, relevant, rich platform that you can get that data out in a way that's digestible, so you can take action. How does a company take advantage of the data that they have? What are some approaches that you guys see as low-hanging fruit use cases? Some people would be overwhelmed with data either. The number of data we hear from your customer at the Dollar Shave Club talking about, there's so many data points coming in from multiple directions and going out in multiple directions too, on the channel, whatever you want to call it. How do you get your hands on that data? It's overwhelming. What's some approach that people can take? So a couple of things there. One is decide before you even start looking at data what do you think is important, right? So really simplify and clarify it down to what you need to be tracking. And then it's very easy to have 20 different systems that you bring in all separately and try to stitch them together. It's more important. One of the things you try to do with Adobe Commerce Cloud is bring together something that's already kind of pre-integrated together to make it easier to kind of get up and running and get going. Because it is very difficult to pull all that together unless you've got a framework of things working together. And then having the dashboards pre-built so you can get up and running. And then over time you can tweak it and customize it but getting those core insights out there. We were just talking on camera before we started about operational AI versus operational data versus trying to boil the ocean over. And that's the best practice or approach you see. Yeah, I call it a little bit of more operational AI which is so many different use cases for making data-driven decisions and things that are really top of mind for merchants today. We hear a lot about one-on-one personalization which is super important, particularly as you move from being computer-based e-commerce to mobile to voice. Getting that personalization right is critical. But there's a lot of things on the back end too that can happen. How do you tag pictures? How do you tag merchandise? How do you really streamline the fulfillment process? So you're getting the product from the right place to the right person as quickly and cheaply as possible. One of the questions, one of the comments on the keynote I thought was great from the engineering part, talk track was open data, open APIs. Very critical, we're big believers of that. But as customers are challenged with first-party data, they're relying on these platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and other things that are not necessarily being more open. The stricter access to the data, I mean Twitter's all got data out there you can get that data. Hard to get LinkedIn data, it's hard to get Facebook data. How do you look at 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 can't be reliable. So how do you guys look at that? What's the approach? Do they have more first-party data on their site or is there a methodology or mechanism that they could deploy? So no silver bullet, but I think first and foremost, we always have to keep the customer first, right? And so trust and transparency is of the utmost important. And so it's important, and we do this in everything we build 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, the trust that we're building for that merchant with those end customers, that has to be paramount to everything else. So when in doubt, err on the side of creating real deep trust and transparency with customers. That's awesome. Talk about the culture at Adobe. You're now part of the company from Magenty. Is there a good culture there? 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 estimation. For the folks that might not be comfortable or might not know Adobe, I should say. What is it about? What's going on at Adobe? What's the magic here? What's the top story? There is a lot. There's a lot going on. And the integration with Gento over the last, I guess nine months now, went by fast, it's been phenomenal. I think, as you said, not only has there been a strategic fit between the product set and what Adobe's trying to do overall, but a cultural fit as well. They're really dedicated to creating an environment where people can thrive and being respectful of individuals and really driving and helping transform the world. And so when you've got a mission of really, how do you help digitally transform whether it's B2C or B2B customers? It's amazing. There's just a lot going on. Final question. What's your plans for this year? What's your goals? Grow the commerce piece, get it shipped and get it available. What's your objectives? Continue to scale up a platform which is just phenomenal. The only one in the industry that really delivers great B2C and B2B experience is and really scale that up and help deliver, particularly for our larger mid-market enterprise customers, help them deliver on the promise 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 customer journey that builds a brand, right? The most important thing is your brand and what you're doing there and how do you, the end user customers have higher and higher expectations these days and how do you really follow them through the entire customer journey? It's been the holy grail that we've been chasing for a long time now. We're getting some visibility into it. Yeah, absolutely. It's really coming to fruition. Mark Lenhard here on theCUBE. Thanks for coming on and sharing your insights. Appreciate it. Thank you very much. I'm John with Jeff with Mark. Stay with us for more after this short break.