 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 win for Magento Imagine 2019. We're excited to welcome to theCUBE TJ Gamble, not only the CEO of Jamerson, but a Magento master. That's the big one right there. Right? Yeah, that's the important one. Don't forget that one. Well, one of the things I wish our audience could see is an awesome orange cape that you and the other masters were wearing this morning. If I had known, if I had known, I'd have brought the cape, but the cape's going to get framed and put up somewhere, so we tucked it away in the bag. 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? The community is a little apprehensive, a little concerned. Change is always a concern for people. Things are going so well, Magento's growing. Everything is positive for it, and then you have Adobe come in and acquire it. So people are, 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, the Amazon channels they're 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 kind of 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. What's a whole bunch of resources, right? The new investment, and as you've seen it kind of change hands a couple of times as an independent company, then go into eBay, then out of eBay, private equity, and now into Adobe, and yet the community has been very, very grounded and stuck with the platform all the way around. Open source is a huge part of this story. Small, medium-sized business is a huge part of this story. You have some really big announcements today kind of integrating into the Amazon e-commerce system, integrating into the Google shopping systems. And I still can't believe that Adobe didn't have an e-commerce 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 from the ground up themselves. You know, if you 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 I say, it's just a perfect fit into the Adobe ecosystem. And I don't know why they didn't have an e-commerce 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 going to 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 and the marketplace, Google Shopping, aimed at assuaging the fears that some of those small and medium sized businesses may have had in the last year of being acquired by an company at Adobe that has a very strong enterprise presence? Yeah, it's not so much those features are, it's, you're starting to see the investment so that's good, but those features are more about, e-commerce 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 going to eventually roll something out. They're already doing it with WhatsApp. Instagram just announced the checkout 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 right in your e-commerce 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. Or a lot of resources, right? Exactly, so if the e-com 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 $800 million next quarter. Three months, they're spending $800 million to go from two day prime to one day prime. Like 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 e-commerce to your customers instead of forwarding customers to your e-commerce. It's a great example, bringing it to the customers. And I'm curious to get kind of your take on the small, medium e-commerce players out there, this kind of experience message, right? It's a big piece of the Adobe story. We were at Adobe some at a couple of 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 I said, that's easy if you got a lot of resources but I'm curious, are smaller merchants seeing that? Are they changing the way that 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 merchants, what kind of resources they actually have to dedicate to it. The great thing about experience is once you have a platform with limitations like an Instagram checkout, 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. If you're a small mom and pop and you gain access to Instagram checkout, it's going to 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. But what about kind of the competition with somebody like in Amazon where on one hand it's a great distribution channel for me as a small merchant. I've got some specialty items but I used to always joke, right? Good news just got in order from Walmart. Bad news has just gotten in order from Walmart, right? So the scale issues, as you mentioned Instagram, suddenly I turn on Instagram and my cup goes viral. How are small merchants kind of playing both sides of that coin? I want to play with Amazon. I want to use their distribution technology. I want to use Instagram, Instapay, but at the same time I've got limited resources. Oh my God, one of these things hits 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 strategize? Well, 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, you know, not to quote, we don't want to quote 90s rap on here, but in the words of the immortal too short, you should be getting it while the getting's good, right? 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. And when you get in that situation, they're 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 there's something's going to happen with Amazon. Every juggernaut dies at some point. We may be 100 years from now before we see that happen, but something's going to 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 e-commerce. We just can't have it. So something's going to happen between now and when we get there. And I'm not, you know, Nostradamus, I'm not going to prognosticate what that is, but changes are going to 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 that we want to 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 transaction or a buying process on mobile is really critical. One of the things also announced today was progressive web apps. Where 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've definitely mentioned it today. It wasn't necessarily announced. It was announced, I want to 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. PWA's 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. But it's a single page application which means you load your app once and then elements when you're moving through the site, elements that are the same don't refresh. Like if the navigation, the header's 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 e-commerce which is why it's coming fast. Number one, you're going to 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 going to 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. And really in e-commerce there's 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? It goes back to the conversion rates and Google sending you stuff. How much do they order? Well, they're more likely to order more when it's fast and they go right through and they can browse through a thousand products really quickly and then how frequently do they order from you? That's it. Every other stat in e-commerce 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're watching this two months from now, the risk is a lot lower. But the technology's new. The tooling is a little new. It still needs to mature a little bit to be readily 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 going to launch it later this year, you're going to launch it early next year, you absolutely have to look at it. And if you're going to start the website next year sometime, 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. Like it's going to be that fast. T.J., I want to get your perspective on something else that we were talking about here at the show, and that's AI. And talk of AI and machine learning for a long time, that's what we kind of suspected. Really, the easy applications for those are inside somebody else's application. We're seeing Adobe use AI on the back end, on all the marketing side, because 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 kind of what you can build and what you can deliver to the customer, even if you're an SMB, because you're leveraging AI back in systems, way back supporting you. Yeah, the AI is, it's 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. So I'm excited about it. What AI and e-commerce, 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 is so much competition, pretty much every product and service. TJ, we thank you so much for joining us on theCUBE this afternoon. Next time you've got to come back with your Orange Magento MasterCade. I'll bring the tape, if they would have just told me how to brought it. But I'm sorry. You have to come back. I know, now I've got an excuse. I'll forget it next time, so I have to come back again. There you go. All right, TJ, thank you so much for joining us. 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.