 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Magento Imagine 2019, brought to you by Adobe. Hi, welcome back to theCUBE. Lisa Martin with Jeff Frick at Imagine 2019, the win Las Vegas with about 3,500 customers, lots of partners, lots of developers, lot of energy here, and speaking of energy, we have Jason Woosley, VP of Commerce at Adobe. Jason, you came onto the stage this morning from the clouds, suspended, talk about energy. It was a lot of energy and there was a message behind it, right? I mean, we really are talking about our cloud penetration and how that is the future. So, you know, I got to do something really cool and check something off the bucket list where I actually did descend from the sky onto the stage. It was the best imagine entrance I've ever done. And really does talk about, you know, how important our cloud strategy is. Thanks for having me on, by the way. So, a lot of energy here. Again, community, community, community. We go to so many shows. So many people are desperate to engage developers. And you guys have that in your core. It's been there from day one. Continues to be such an important part of who you are as well as the road forward. It's the reason for why we are where we are today. I mean, bar none, right? Our community, this ecosystem, and it's not something you can buy. It's not something you can, you can even intentionally build. You have to nurture, you have to create a platform that speaks to a large audience. And then you just kind of make sure that you're treating those developers and your partners really, really well, empowering them to really differentiate that experience at the last mile. And, you know, it is, it's a flywheel effect. You end up with this incredible community that's anxious to contribute back into our core base. And they have made, what you see at this conference is a result of that community. It's not anything that Magento could do. It's not anything that Adobe could do. It is just something that has to organically happen. And then you have to nurture the heck out of it. And that's really what we've done. And this is a community that you said has grown organically to several hundred thousand people who, I feel like to say that they're influential to Magento, the technologies is actually an understatement with how much, how again, I think influential is the wrong word. They're stronger than that. They're absolutely core to it, right? I mean, they're an extension of our development methodology. I like to think about, I run engineering as part of my organization and everybody in my group is customer facing. Just like everybody in our community is customer facing. And so we've tried to tear down the walls that separate our community members from our internal core engineers because it creates this incredible diversity of perspective that you can't find anywhere else. I mean, no matter how much I invest in broadly diverse engineering teams across the globe, 300,000 engineers, they call themselves Magento developers, don't take a paycheck from Adobe, but contribute back to our code base, influence our roadmap and really show us the way. It's an incredible phenomenon. In the last year since the announcement of the Adobe acquisition and the actual completion about six, seven months ago, how has that community reacted? Strengthens, what have been some of your surprising observations about the community? It is surprising, and I'll tell you why. I think we came into the acquisition with a lot of apprehension, right? There was a concern that Adobe's too big, they're too corporate, they don't really love open source, all untrue, right? Adobe has incredible open source initiatives already inside, but you don't hear a lot about it. And so our community, I think, was it's a little bit concerned about, does the level of investment go down? Does all of our ability to promote that product, does that, we start to back off of that? And of course we have not done that at all, and in fact what we've seen is that our community loves the Adobe acquisition, they see the opportunity just as clearly as we do. We have more than triple digit growth in the number of community contributions coming into us since the acquisition last year. It is the clear sign that the ecosystem is fully on board with where we're going. Well clearly the Adobe suite provides so much gunpowder to power the commerce that's been at the core of Magento from the beginning. I mean it almost begs the question, why didn't this happen a long, long time ago? I think there's something to be said about that, but you know what, it took Adobe a while, they picked the right platform, we're very confident of that. And their investment in community is actually paying off on the Adobe side, right? When you think about digital experience products, they are now more active than ever in open source projects. We've got folks from Adobe Experience Manager that are writing code and contributing to Magento, which is, it's absolutely terrific. And they're now talking about how do we get the ability to kind of create that contribution mechanism and at least create a platform concept where everybody plays as an equal playing field, you can serve as small, you can serve as large, and it just brings everybody together to solve these common, complex problems that our joint merchants face. I don't know how many times you've been on stage in the last two days, but a couple. But one of the themes you really, didn't pound on the table, but you basically pound on the table and said, we are still totally 100% behind SMB. It's our core, we're not giving that up. We built this market together, right? This is what made Magento what it is. It's where we play the best, we know it better than anybody else in the industry and we're not retreating, we're doubling down. We've got ground to take in the mid-market and I can't wait to do it. Right, but what's wild is you're enabling the mid-market to compete with the tools of the big guys. So, announcements around the integration with Amazon, announcements around integration with Google. So it's kind of an interesting place for small retailers, small merchants, they've got to compete in this world. So you're really giving them an opportunity to both play in what might be a big competitor as well as leverage that ecosystem and assets as well as doing it within their own brick and mortar or their own sites. And that's a terrific point. I think one of the reasons we do that is we've seen consumer expectations rising through the roof, right? I mean, everything from fast shipping is now one day and it wasn't very long ago that fast shipping was. If you could get it within a week, that was pretty darn quick. But now fast shipping is one day and that's across the board. Consumers are expecting frictionless payment. They're expecting buy online pickup in store, omnichannel capabilities, really all of these capabilities and a consumer, a shopper doesn't care whether you're big or small. What they care about is the experience that they consume when they interact with your brand. And so bringing the tools of the enterprise to the mid-market allows them to compete on a more level playing field. And that's really where you generate all this great innovation. And that's where you see these smaller merchants that are really able to drive into something that may not have been a core target for some of the larger enterprises but they find a niche and they're able to deliver but they have the same personalization needs they have the same logistics needs. All of that is not changed just because they're a smaller organization. And so it's really on us to be able to provide them the tooling and the access to the capabilities that let them compete with the larger merchants. Yeah, cause you're right. As consumers, which we are every day, we don't care if they're a big or small company or what technologies they, well, no we do care to a degree that we can start something from a mobile phone, have a great seamless experience that's not going to cause me to churn cause I'm not going to be able to find what I want. I want it to be personalized. I want them to know enough about me in a creepy, not in a non-creepy way as you say magic. If it's good, it's magic, if it's bad, it's creepy. Right, regardless of recommendation engines. And it's a fact that they have what I want but also what you're doing now is giving these SMBs these smaller organizations the ability to harness this sort of symbiotic data power between Adobe and Magento for advertising, analytics, marketing, commerce to be able to have that wealth of knowledge to make that experience exactly what that consumer expects. Exactly right, I mean it's about bringing the behavioral data and the transactional data together to really get a 360 degree view of individual customers and guess what, there's too much raw data there for Excel to ever be able to tell you anything. You've got to rely on things like artificial intelligence and machine learning so things like Adobe Sensei to really derive insights out of that mass set of data but that's the way you create those personalized experiences. You have to employ those techniques to get there. Right, I just wanted to unpack the Sensei announcement a little bit because I think that's really interesting. AI's been a great buzzword, we see it a lot of places. Our Google email now automatically figures out what we want to reply to our email but it's the integration of AI in applications as we're really starting to see it come to market early. And this is a great example of using Adobe AI inside a Sensei on specific parts of the application to deliver a better application and better consumer experience. And we've got a great roadmap for rolling out artificial intelligence capabilities to Magento Commerce. It's one of the largest value ads that we'll do over the next 12 months is really bringing those capabilities around recommendations around experience personalization and experience targeting around A-B testing. And then you think a little bit into the future and suddenly you're looking at an AI that can give you pricing recommendations and campaign recommendations. And that's a world that we cannot wait to really explore fully in the commerce world because I think that those are the tools. Now Amazon applies a lot of dynamic pricing techniques right now, it's a really expensive process. I don't know a lot of small merchants that have access to the tools to do that. We're bringing those tools to small merchants and that's going to change the game fundamentally I believe. In a way that they can do it almost themselves rather than having to have a team of resources which a small business doesn't have. And that is the name of the game for small business. You can't require them to have a data science team. You can't require them to have an IT staff or a web development team. You've got to give them everything they need so that they can focus on retail, what they know best. Merchandising to their customers and managing their inventory, driving the correct margins and then making sure that they're able to grow the lifetime value of their customers. That's the holy grail for retail is when you can actually optimize against lifetime value. Because it's the number one thing that all merchants are chasing. Yeah, because you had the guy on the keynote yesterday. I'm not in the demographic. I'm trying to remember the name of the... Oh, Troy, Troy Brown from Zoomies. From Zoomies, yeah. It is, I thought it was just really interesting, you know, just kind of rethinking retail, right? Retail is not dead, but it's different and you have to be different and really to see how they have kind of taken their concept, I thought was pretty interesting, especially around the fact that he has no more fulfillment centers, he said. Basically they're fulfilling from the store. They want to engage you in the store, it's a convenient thing, especially now we see Amazon packages are all getting stolen off of doorsteps, but enabling them to be creative around their customer engagement, not necessarily worry about how to run a bunch of A-B tests. They let you do that complicated stuff. Let us take on all the complexity and then they can actually benefit from the insights derived from that. And what Zoomies have done is it's a phenomenal story, I mean, going away from the centralized warehouse concept to really turning all of their stores into distribution centers, right? 704 or so brick and mortar strong where they now have merchandise close to their consumers. They have the ability to do showcasing, buy online pickup in store, all of the omnichannel techniques that are grabbing so much traction right now and Zoomies has really capitalized. They've done a terrific job and it's great seeing it come from these really innovative retailers, right? I mean, that show last night with Zoomies was absolutely fantastic. Their culture is super unique, highly energetic, but they're driving technology forward in a way that you might not expect from a skateboard apparel shop, right? Well, they're making Champion cool again. He came out on the Champion and it was in the demo. I'm like, I didn't know Champion was a cool brand again. Apparently it is cool now. It's cool now. You and I are both out of that demographic, but it is, it is a very good story. One of the things that we are hearing and seeing is that, you know, we talked about personalization and this expectation that as consumers we bring to everything we buy, whatever it happens to be, but also this sort of looking at Amazon as an example of going to brick and mortar from purely online, the acquisition of Whole Foods. People still wanting to have that human interaction. We talk about it all the time when we talk about AI is that pretty much the common thread is, yes AI and maybe yes online to a degree and then there's still that need and that demand for that personal face to face or maybe voice to voice interaction. Yeah, well, you know, it's really for me, it's about taking that brand experience and making sure that it's resonating across all of your digital properties as well as all of the physical properties, right? It is about really leveraging my brand experience is consistent across every place that I encounter my customers and I'm ready to transact anytime my customers are ready to transact. And, you know, talking about Amazon, we've announced some really cool stuff, this Ad Imagine on Amazon, a partnership where Amazon sellers can now have a branded storefront on Magento, this is allowing, you know, folks that have done a terrific job selling in the marketplace where you don't, you don't have a lot of opportunity for experience differentiation on the Amazon.com site, right, and that's, you know, it's a terrific marketplace, more than 50% of product searches are starting on Amazon now. So it's a reality that retailers need to, you know, find a way to come to grips with. And what I'm really excited about is that those merchants that are doing really well on Amazon now have a new channel where they can create these branded experiences and really start differentiating themselves from their competitors. It's going to be a terrific story. It's a, you know, branded storefronts for Amazon sellers is the name of the offering and it's going to change the game for folks that have been exclusively Amazon, maybe thinking it's too hard to go, you know, get an online presence that actually represents my brand. Now it's a piece of cake. They've got a clean path to get there and the capabilities go both ways, right? We also announced Amazon sales channel from Agento Commerce that allows you, you know, as a branded merchant to go and participate on the Amazon marketplace and have full control over your inventory, your orders and all of your catalog. So funny, you know, we talked about experience, but so much of retail execution is actually inventory execution, right? It's inventory management. That's where all of your money sits. You can get it real upside down really quickly if you're not managing your inventory. And if you don't have the right amount of inventory, especially as you say, with same day delivery now being an expected behavior. And so to have the sophisticated tools on the back end to manage that inventory across that broad kind of distribution plane, if you will, all these different points of engagement is so critical to these guys to have any type of chance of success. It is, it's absolutely critical. And, you know, we've also got a Magento Order Management product that specializes in sort of global inventory control. We've made terrific investments there to bring new capabilities to make sure that those omnichannel aspirations are not something that, you know, a merchant has to go invest a whole lot of money in changing their systems. I think, you know, it is interesting to think about when you talk about, you know, how B to C is really bleeding into B to B, right? Supply chain management, you know, 70% of our B to C merchants self-described actually engage in B to B workflows. And almost all of our B to B only merchants are really looking at how do I go B to B to C? Right. So there's this really great, great platform play happening. And the fact that Magento Commerce and Adobe Commerce Cloud can serve us B to B and B to C and all the hybrids in between really puts us in a differentiated position and helps merchants not have to go invest in multiple platform, you know, multiple maintainability and then find some way to reconcile the inventory between the two. Right. And we had a quote earlier today. I can't remember who said it, but I thought it was great where, you know, no longer is the actual transaction the destination, right? But now you're bringing the transaction to, you know, kind of the journey. It's a very different way to think about a traditional funnel. It isn't a traditional funnel that you work your way down to the end. Now you're inserting, you know, commerce opportunities, engagement opportunities all along kind of this content flow. We kind of teased ourselves, right? And we kind of lied to ourselves and said that, you know, this is a linear journey and we've all bought into it, right? You know all the steps, right? It's a, you know, discovery awareness. I mean, all the way to post-purchase. It's not linear. People move in and out of each of those sections. And so being able to, you know, transact where the customer is ready to transact is critically important. And then, you know, understanding that the post-sale service is the key to lifetime value. That's the other major learning that we're trying to take away from this. And that's why it's important to be at every point your customer is. Yeah, it's interesting, because especially with these things, because you don't sit down. You don't sit down to work on your phone like we sat down to work at these things. That's right. And so your attention- Works coming to you. It's coming to you and it's coming in little bits. And oh, by the way, there's a whole bunch of notifications coming on that could pull you away. So it's a very different challenge in terms of an actual engagement when this is the primary vehicle. And increasingly it is the primary vehicle, right? Absolutely. More than 50% of traffic to retail e-commerce site is generated from a mobile phone. And there are emergent markets where that is the only internet connected device. And so it's the standard. You absolutely have to take mobile very seriously. There's a great set of technologies coming online to help us get there. It's called Progressive Web Application. It's going to change the game on how mobile is treated as a device. And in fact, it gets rid of the need for discrete native applications. So instead of having an iOS app, an Android app, a desktop storefront, a mobile storefront, and maybe a tablet storefront, plus your online brick-and-mortar, now you can actually say my digital properties are serviced by one set of technologies. And that way when I make a change to one, it shows up in everything I don't have. All these different code bases to maintain. It's a total cost of ownership and really a time to market play across the board. I have to say faster time to market for sure. Absolutely, yeah. With far less resources. Well, and bringing it so that you really have to invest in allowing your merchandisers to merchandise on your digital properties, right? If there is an engineer sitting between your merchandiser and the customer, that time lag and even just trying to get it done. There's so much frustration there. So creating these self-service tools that really allow non-technical merchandisers to go in, make adjustments to how they're selling products across all those channels very, very easily and in one place that's going to return a ton of value to our merchants. So it's another thing that we're super excited about. Yeah, you deliver that consistent experience that the consumer is expecting and then, and we were talking to PayPal earlier, start to help companies close that revenue gap of getting them from mobile to wanting to transact and making that whole process seamless. There's a nine billion dollar opportunity in closing the mobile gap. When you think about abandoned carts and folks that begin the checkout process, for whatever reason, likely they get frustrated and don't want to type in their credit card number or don't want to type in their address and then they move to another device or another store that's doing checkout in a more frictionless way, the nine billion dollar opportunity if you close that. Wow, that's huge. So it's incredibly important. It is incredibly important. Well, Jason, we wish we had more time but we thank you so much for stopping by theCUBE and talking with Jeff and me. Such an exciting time. Sounds like developers are feeling embraced. The community is happy. Customers are reacting well so we can't wait to hear what's next next year. This is the best place to be in the world in commerce. Thank you guys so much for having me on. It's always a pleasure and I've enjoyed it a lot. Our pleasure as well, Jason. Thank you guys. For Jeff Frick, I'm Lisa Martin at Imagine 2019 at the Win Las Vegas. Thanks for watching.