 Live from the Wynn Hotel in Las Vegas. It's theCUBE, covering Magento Imagine 2018. Brought to you by Magento. Hello everyone, welcome back. We are here broadcasting here at the Wynn in Las Vegas for Magento event here from theCUBE. Exclusive coverage 2018, I'm here with John Stockton. He's the Vice President of Product Management, Magento. Talking about the new product news, really modernizing the e-commerce stack, enabling digital growth, and great to have you. Thanks for coming on. Great, thanks for being here. So, you guys have a digital experience culture here at the company, but one of the things that's interesting is the modern stack of e-commerce needs an upgrade, it's been tough enough for years. You guys are doing that. You've got thousands and thousands of customers and partners, get the product news here. Let's dig into the news. What do you guys have? What are you refreshing? What do you bring into the table? Well, it's a really exciting time here to be at Magento and we are announcing a number of big initiatives here at the conference. The first is around our superior shopping experience goal. Our goal is to continue to support an evolving consumer culture where more and more people are doing things on mobile devices, more and more people are doing things in store. We've been working very closely with Google on their progressive web apps initiative and we'll be announcing here our PWA developer studio is going to be an early adopter program and generally available at the end of the year. And that's going to enable Magento merchants and our partners in our ecosystem to be able to create really cool progressive web apps. Progressive web apps are going to revolutionize the way we experience digital commerce on mobile devices. They're much more performant, much faster. They're going to be the way of the future and I don't think any merchant in the world can afford to ignore them. Our PWA Dev Studio is going to make it easy for merchants to create those apps and that's really exciting. That's the first big news. Let's dig into that. I know you've got two more I want to get to but this is kind of important. We've been hearing about mobile first for years. Certainly Google has put the sprues on search results. Absolutely. Response time on mobile. What's the impact of customers on this news? What does it give them? Yeah, for a lot of our customers, more than 50% of their transactions today are coming from mobile so it's just a trend that they can't ignore at all. What happens when you take a native app on mobile today is you might be able to do a good work with responsive design but the performance expectations that consumers have for a page loading instantaneously, for no delays in scrolling around, for checkout. Increasingly, things like Apple Pay and Google Pay, the ability to just do a facial recognition and actually check out and pay for something on a phone. That's what consumers are going to expect in the future and PWA is really the only way you're going to be able to meet those. And that makes them take a web response design and make it feel like a native app. Yes. Very high performance and very high integration with the actual phone. All right, so the next announcement is what? The next big thing is on our omni-channel initiative, we want to enable our merchants to be able to sell effectively in any channel. And the big news there is we are going to be releasing a Amazon sales channels module for Magento Commerce that enables the Magento merchant to push their catalog out to the Amazon marketplace, do things like dynamic and competitive pricing and then track all that transaction data as their products are sold on Amazon. So for directly within Magento, they can manage both channels and see all their results in all in one place. So this is kind of interesting, Amazon. Obviously, as Amazon, we know what's going on with those guys. So what's the improvement? I mean, obviously you can publish Amazon marketplace. What's the innovation? Where's the new updates? You mentioned pricing, is it a relationship with Amazon? Is it the code native? What's going on? The innovation is in the data integration of getting your product catalog into Amazon, which is going to be easier than ever before. You're going to have visibility into performance within Amazon directly from Magento. And then all that transaction data is going to come back to Magento. So when you're using Magento Commerce or our business intelligence tools, you're going to have a single source of truth for how you're performing across both channels. And plus massive sales opportunity for growth. Just on a sales perspective. Amazon's the big gorilla. Okay, third announcement? The third announcement is in our business intelligence planks. So we have the Magento business intelligence product is now available to all Magento customers who have a commercial license with us at no extra cost. So MBI is a full stack business intelligence data warehouse solution that tracks all your data from all Magento products, commerce, order management and rolls it up into great dashboards, visualization tools, allows you to integrate it with Google Analytics and other data sources. So we're collecting rich data on consumers behavior across both your physical stores with our order management solution and your online properties with Magento Commerce and giving you a really unbeatable combination of data points on your consumers. It's going to really unlock a lot of potential value. So this brings more wrangling to the table, less complexity, offline online kind of perspective. Yeah, a lot less complexity. It is an out of the box BI solution. It's an out of the box data warehouse that integrates the core data that you want. We have a pro addition that allows you to integrate your other data. So you can integrate CRM data or other things. It's a great way to get a single source of truth reporting solution for all of your commerce types of points. And that's all customers, no charge. Yeah, the essentials addition is now included no charge and there is a pro addition that is a premium product. So product, you run the product management which you got to keep your eye on the prize. You got to look at the engineering and then look at the customers and you got to kind of make decisions. So as you look at the growth of commerce just in general online, there's no denying that going to a whole nother level. Yep. How do you guys prioritize? Because I mean there's like so many things you could work on. Yeah, it is. What are some of the guiding principles? How do you guys make these decisions? What's the internal DNA like? Share some inside baseball. Yeah, sure. You know, our philosophy is the three pillars I mentioned superior shopping experiences, omnichannel and business intelligence. Those are areas that we know are durable areas of investment that are going to provide value to market. The fourth one is our open ecosystem and that's really unique to Magento. So we partner with over 1,100 partners. We have an open source platform that a community contributes to and we're doing a lot to get a lot more leverage out of that and that allows us to innovate a lot faster. So for example, the day the Amazon patent expired we had a community partner submit a one click order feature into the code base. We ran it through a quality assurance product and I believe we were the first to market with one click order. So what happens is even beyond the core organic development that the internal R&D team is doing we have so much innovation going on that's customer driven, partner driven and that gives us a very rich opportunity to go into areas that even where we are following our partners or our community we're able to incorporate things into the product as the market demands them. I think that's a unique and compelling thing that's different I think about you guys that I like is, you know, the old model was we got to own everything, every little feature and you know, you look at startups out there oh that's really a feature not a startup it's an old joke it's Silicon Valley but the reality is that you have partners that have business so they can build a really hyper focused feature bring it to the table you incorporate it in through your ecosystem. That's right. That's what you're referring to, right? Yeah, absolutely and you know being I think the business model around closed platforms is fundamentally flawed in that regard because the vendor can never keep up with the rate of innovation especially in a space like e-commerce where things are happening so fast it would be impossible for anyone vendor to stay on top of it all. So your strategy, stay to your core pillars. Let the ecosystem innovate, you got the open source which is a playground for more innovation, creative ideation and then you have a pipeline in through the product team for QA quality assurance kind of thing going on there. Absolutely, absolutely. And then ship it out to all your customers. That's right. You know what, market plays through. Well we do, we have a variety of ways to get out so our partners can get extensions out to the market through our marketplace which is the best place to get Magento extensions. We're also doing a core bundled extension program so we will be announcing tomorrow that we have three new core bundled extension partners. We're partnering with Vertex for Tax, Klarna for deferred payments and Amazon Pay as a payment method. And so those are integrations that those vendors have done to Magento that we have certified and blessed as the highest quality and merchants who deploy Magento 224, which will include those bundled extensions can turn them on with a flip of the switch. So we're doing a lot more innovation to make those solutions available to customers. I mean it's innovative because you have some things that might not be in the product road, resources is always the contention for resources. But when you got partners to innovate, I just saw a folks I was talking about at lunch break walking around, you got a coin crypto solution here. Hey, we can do 400 tokens. I don't even know, there's like thousands of tokens but if someone wants to do, say, crypto currency, a partner steps up, that's enabled, that's an option. So if someone says, hey, I want to take Bitcoin, you can fit that in. Yes, absolutely. We also give us great advantage on our global reach as well because we can work with partners who want to localize us and take us into markets where we don't have a direct presence today. But the open platform, the fact that we're so partner friendly and ecosystem friendly, makes it possible for other people to build businesses and take us into places. We were talking before we came on camera about your previous experience, you've been in the industry for a while, you've seen some waves, we know, we're old enough to see some of those e-commerce, and again, e-commerce is 25 years old. And it's always been kind of a monolithic, one directional, it pushed to an end point. Yeah, you got JSON now end points, but the demand is for rich experience, consumer to consumer potentially, peer to peer action, all the stuff's going on. What attracted you to these guys for your job? And what do you look at in terms of big waves that you want our guys ride on? Yeah, what attracted me to Magento is my first opportunity to be at an open source platform company, and so the excitement all around here at this event is really validating that this is a fun place to be, this is a great approach to market. I think it's a much more interesting way to build products than the old school ways are. So I'm really excited about that. And to your point about evolving needs, both the omnichannel need, and then also we've been doing a lot of B2B scenarios, so we have customers using Magento in very innovative ways that again, are outside the box of what we intended when we first built the product. So we have a customer, we have partners here who are doing marketplace solutions right now where our customers are hosting marketplaces where their consumers are selling products to each other, which is a really cool use case. We have always had customers using us in B2B contexts, even though we didn't have the native B2B functionality built in. In 2.2, which just came out last year, we made a big investment to beef up some B2B capabilities in the product, and we'll be making more investments in those in the coming years as well, so. Everything flows in from the B2C because mobile's expected there, now you're seeing mobile first, cloud first, for B2B, and they're kind of upping their game. You got to update, everything's online now. And a lot of, if not all of our B2C customers have some B2B dimension to their business, right? So it makes sense for their digital platform to serve not only their direct consumer fronts, but all their commerce initiatives. What's the big thing that you see out there for the B2B customers, because I see B2B really moving faster now than ever before, because they used to have the old websites. And now they're putting rich media on there, they want to do some, you know, soft versus service, everything's moving digital on B2B. Is it awakening? Is it waking up and smelling the coffee? What's going on? I think it is. People are people and whether you're shopping for a blender or you're a procurement officer and you need to buy IT equipment, you have expectations that you're going to be digitally served with the high quality. The market is moving that way very fast. There's a lot of potential to create better experiences for your customer that way. And there's a lot of opportunity to get more efficiency out of your processes by bringing them to the digital platform. And then obviously open sourcing, the role of the community is super important. Talk about the labs, Magento Labs, how does that fit into all this? We saw some folks up there getting awards on Kino today. What's this labs thing about? Yeah, so we have a program with our Magento masters where we recognize people for contributions to the community. And so we gave out awards yesterday morning for the top contributors. We had in the 2.2.4 release that's coming out tomorrow, we had over 200 community contributions. People were submitting enhancements to the product, fixes, improvements, security improvements, performance improvements. So the amount of contribution to the community is still really, from the community, is still really, really valuable and we really recognize and reward and support that. Real competitive advantage. So I got to ask you the data question. Role of data is so valuable. You're seeing data, whether it's IoT devices being potentially in retail outlets. I mean, wearables is an IoT device. You know, Alphabet can be considered a wearable, some degree, it's a device. But data moving around, having data integrate is a huge issue. How is that impacting? Your business, obviously you can imagine, pretty significantly impacting both market intelligence, real-time bidding, real-time user experiences. Without data, you really can't get near real time. That's absolutely right, yeah. What's your view on that? Yeah, so data is going to be the next big revolution, I think, as digital commerce spreads across all channels. Consumers are going to expect you know who they are when you walk in the store, you remember the past transactions and interactions you had with them. You're personalizing your outreach and experience for them. And so data is key to all of that. So right now we're in a foundation building phase where we're getting all that data into Magento Business Intelligence. We're building a data lake. We recognize for our customers that connecting all that data together and rationalizing it all is a challenge. And we think we can do a lot to solve that challenge for them through our business intelligence tools. John, great to have you on theCUBE and sharing the insights. Final question for you is what's one or two things that someone might not know about Magento that they should know about? The approach, the products, how you guys build technology, happy customers. What's the one, two things that they should know about that they may not know about? I think people know Magento as an open source platform and open source brand. They may not know that we are having a lot of success up market right now. We are increasingly getting pulled into enterprise businesses and running very large scale businesses for people. They may not know us as a B2B solution provider. They may think of us as a B2C only solution provider. So we're doing a lot in B2B right now. And they may not know how much we've invested in the people at Magento. In the Austin office where I work, we've more than doubled in size in the last year. So we are growing like crazy. We're bringing a lot of talent to the company. And it's a great- Yeah, I get a great ecosystem. And what's the reason why you guys are being successful? Speed, performance, flexibility, all the above. What's the key thing? All the above. I think we get a lot of pull from the market. The Magento brand is still very solid. There's a lot of people out on open source who are looking to upgrade and move up and that creates a great pipeline for us. You know, I think the competitive landscape is got options on the lower end and options on the higher end that are a little bit old school. And I think we have an advantage in the innovation and thinking of bringing the market that's going to serve us well in the future. And the pressure to go digital, all that's 100% is really on everyone's shoulders that these days. Everything's digital. Yeah. John Stein, the Vice President of Product Management at Magento. We're here at Imagine 2018 in Vegas. The Cube's exclusive coverage. Get back with more coverage after this short break.