 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 live at the Win Las Vegas for Magento Imagine 2019 with about 3,500 people here. Give or take a few. We're very pleased to welcome Magento Evangelist Ben Marks to theCUBE. Ben, welcome. Thank you, thank you, thank you for having me. I appreciate you making time. And thanks for bringing the flair to our set. I've got to let people know where my allegiances lie, right? So this is the first Magento Imagine post-Adobe acquisition that was announced about a year ago, completed about six or seven months ago. You have a very strong history with Magento the last 10 years. Magento is very much known for their developer community, their open source history and DNA. Talk to us about how things are now with the community and really the influence that the developers have. Well, if it's up to me, we retain this really strong influence in the business. I mean at the core of Magento, since its inception, the very humble beginnings that it had back in 2007, has been this developer ecosystem. And that is what takes the software, basically all the output and all of the expertise and intuition that we have that we put into our products and our services. It only goes so far. Now it is a platform that tends to fit in a lot of places but it only goes so far and we have that last mile is that is the most important distance that we cross and we cannot do it without this ecosystem. They are the ones that they know, they understand the merchant requirements, they understand the vertical, they understand the region, they understand cross-border concerns, whatever it may be, they know our product from an expert perspective and then they take that and they make it make sense. That being the case, Adobe I think so far has shown excellent stewardship in terms of recognizing the value. A big part of that 1.7 billion price tag, they paid for the community. They knew this ecosystem was the real, it's always been the X factor in Magento. And so they have, I think they've been very diligent. Well, now that I'm an employee, we've been very introspective about what that means as part of Adobe, as part of this massive set of opportunities and new addressable market that we have. And we're just all trying to make sure that we look after all of these people who are at the end of the day probably our biggest champions. Just curious how you've been able to maintain that culture? Because to be kind of open source and open source first, I don't know if first is the right word, but open source neutral or pro along with your proprietary stuff and to really engage developers is such a special talent and it's a special culture because by rule you're saying that there's more smart people outside of our walls than inside of our walls and embracing and loving that. But you guys have gone through all kinds of interesting kind of evolutions on the business side in terms of ownership and management. Have you been able to maintain that? And what is kind of the secret sauce? Why are the developers so passionate to continue to develop on Magento? Because let me tell you, we go to a lot of conferences and a lot of people are trying really hard to get that developer to spend that next unit of time working on their platform versus a different one. Well, you know, it's endemic to our culture, right? That whether it's a developer, someone who's working, who's an expert in administering Magento stores, just whatever someone's focus is in this ecosystem. It is interesting. What we've always had at the underpinning everything has been this open source ethos, right? So from the very beginnings of Magento, the creators, Roy Rubin and Yov Kutner, they sought out, as they announced this Magento thing back in the day, they intentionally made it open source because they knew that that had been proved by a previous open source commerce software and they knew that that was really where they were going to win. That was a force multiplier. Again, the thing that would get them into markets that they couldn't address with their very small agency that they were working out of. So through the years, that grew. And in large part, we can thank the doc community, especially in Germany, the Dutch community. There's just a general open source ethos there, right? But I learned about open source from Magento, right? I had someone help me out when I was first starting, my first week working with Magento as a developer, I had to go into, there was no documentation, I had to go into a chat room and ask for help. And this guy, he actually spent about a couple hours helping me and we remain close friends to this day. But at the end of it, I'm like, so should I pay you? And he was, this guy from outside of Heidelberg, he's just, no, no, this is open source. It's just as you learn, give it back. And that is a perfect summation for a big part of the spirit here. It helps that we're in e-commerce, right? There's money, there's money kind of flowing all around. But at the end of the day, we provide options. We provide flexibility where, there's nothing wrong with the SaaS platforms, there's nothing wrong with some of the larger like API driven platforms. It's just, at some point, if you have a custom requirement that they can't satisfy, and that happens regularly, I mean, guess what, you got to go with a platform that gives you the extensibility. So they feel a sense of ownership, I think, because of that. And they're sort of proud to take this wherever they can. So with the Adobe acquisition being complete around six, eight months, you mentioned Adobe doing a good job of welcoming this community, but you also talked about this core ethos that Magento brings. I believe in the press release announcing the acquisition last year, Adobe said open source is in our DNA. Have you found that one to be true? And two, how much has the Magento open source community been able to sort of open the eyes and maybe open the door to Adobe's ethos of embracing it? Let's see, how much trouble can I get into today? There's only a few people watching, don't go for it. So I have a good counterpart over Adobe. And it's really, it's a stress for me to call him a counterpart. He's got his JD, he's been big in the open source world for, since forever, but Matt A.C., probably if you- He's alone? Yep, if you follow tech online, like you've seen his posts, you've seen him postulating on open source. And it was interesting, right? A lot of us were asking the same question from the Magento world, like, okay, because a lot of us remembered the eBay days and eBay had sort of a different plan and vision for Magento that ultimately that whole thing they were trying to create just didn't work out. Magento survived, but we're a bit wary. We all knew it was coming, right? It's the natural progression from private equity ownership. But really, where is this open source that we were told about? And Matt is kind of a big piece there, but as it turns out, he jumped on Twitter immediately when none of us were supposed to be talking about anything, of course, but that's in Matt's nature because there is a lot of open source at Adobe. In fact, there's a lot of open source technology that underpins even these enterprise solutions that they offer. I've visited with several of our team members in the Basel office and there are Apache Software Foundation board members. I mean, this is, you want to talk about the beginnings of open source and the impact it's had on the world? Like, these are some of these people. And so, yes, it's there. It's just, you know, I think it's not a secret to say that Adobe really hasn't done a great job of telling that story. So as they, you know, as I've met and kind of toured around with some of the Adobe vice presidents who've been visiting here, and I love that they're engaged. They get this, they want this to expand. It's been really interesting watching them, watching them encounter this and then start to, I think, be inspired by us as much as we are inspired by, again, the opportunities that exist as we all come together. It's great. Yeah, and Matt's been on, he's terrific. We cover CNCF and we'll be at CubeCon, I think, next week in Barcelona. So, we're huge, huge advocates. But I think it's just so, it's such a different way of looking at the world. Again, accepting that there's more smart people outside your four walls than are inside your four walls, which, just by rule, is the way that it has to be. You can't hire all the smart people. So to use that, leverage it and really build this developer app, advocacy is a really tremendous asset. Better together is what we say, and it could not be truer. I mean, there is no way we could know it all. We can't hope to. So what we've done, actually, in the last couple of years, really under the just, some brilliant leadership by Jason Woosley, we've been able to, he decided to double down on our open source investment. And I'd say we truly, that was the moment when we truly became an open source company with through and through, because we spun up and we took our best architects and just put them on a project called Community Engineering that they're dedicated to enabling contribution of fixes, improvements, and features from our ecosystem. So by doing that, we all of a sudden, we now have worldwide engineering that they're all experts in the individual domain. So that line of code that some contribute, some contributor from somewhere is contributing, he or she has become an expert, let's say, in something as glamorous as like total's calculation, like the logic that has to go into that. Because of their real world experience, we get the highest quality code that's just backed up by a lot of trial and tribulation. And from that, we basically get to cover all of our bases and they tend to write things in a way that's way more extensible than probably we could ever envision. I don't know of a better formula for having a product that satisfies something so varied and challenging and just constantly evolving as e-commerce. Well, and I think Jason mentioned this morning that the Community Engineering program was only launched a couple of years ago. Literally, a two years ago February. Just significant impacts in a very short period of time. Yeah, it was, you know, we were fascinated to see that while we'd had this kind of haphazard, almost ad hoc open source engagement up to that point, once we really built machinery around it, I think we've managed to build something that is a model for any other company that wants to try to do this. Once we did that, we very quickly got to our, some releases, some of our big releases where over 50% of the new lines of code were written externally. And that was cool for about a week. And then we realized that's not even the story. You know, the story is everything else I talked about which is just that degree of ownership, that degree of informed engineering that we just, we would never come up with on our own. And it was a real signal to this very patient and resilient ecosystem that, hey, you know, we're all in this together. And now, and of course we've done that also, we've replicated that with our developer documentation. It's all open source and able to be contributed to. And we sort of look at how that can expand, even to the point where our core architecture team, now all of their discussion, so you can go to github.com slash magento. You can go to our, you can see our backlog, you can see where we're discussing features and kind of planning what's coming next. You can also go to our architecture repository and you see all of our core architects having their dialogue with each other in public so that the public is informed and they can be involved. And that is literally, that is the highest stage, I believe, of open source evolution. That's a great story. The other great thing though that Adobe brought to you is some really sophisticated marketing tools to drive the commerce in your engine. So I'm just curious, your perspective, you've been playing in this for a long time, but you guys are really kind of taken over at the transactional level now to have that front end engagement tools, partners, methodologies. I mean, you got to be excited. Well really, so, you know, I'm going back to my, I remember my agency days. I remember why some of the Google analytics code looks the way it does, because I remember the product that it was before, you know, Urchin analytics, right? And I remember when we could first do split tests and one of the first cool projects I ever worked on in Magento 1.1 was sort of parsing Google's cookies to be able to sort of change the interface of Magento, and test that for conversion, right? And to think of how far we've come. Now we have the power and the mandate really to absolutely know everything about the customer experience, the customer journey. And then I'm sitting there in our keynotes, you know, in the general session yesterday looking up and I'm looking at the slide and I'm seeing, you know, 14 trillion transactions that are captured in our various apparatus. And I think, you know, that is, it's tremendous responsibility, it's tremendous power. And if we combine, if we use this insight responsibly, what we do is we continue to do what I think Magento has done all along, which has allowed us to be at, you know, not just at the forefront of where commerce evolves, but really to set the standard that consumers begin to expect. I mean, and I know we've all felt it, right? When you have that experience and it feels very full of friction, it's just, I know we can do better and I will immediately go away from any website that makes it hard for me to do what I want to do. Any website that seems like they're kind of a partner on my journey, that's where I'm, that's where I'm going to spend my time and my money. And that's really, that's really what we're trying, what we're trying to really lean into here. Which is essential because as you mentioned, if I'm doing something on my phone and I expect a really fast transaction and there's friction points, I'm gone, I will be able to find another service or product that meets my need because there's so much choice and there's so much competition for almost every product and service. So being able to leverage the power of advertising, analytics, marketing, and commerce to really deliver the fundamentals that a business needs to truly manage the customer experience as a game changer. Yep, it is, it is. So what we're looking to these days, you know, Magento, just before the acquisition was announced, made a tremendous investment to start up a completely independent trade association called the Magento Association. It's a place for our community to collect under. And, you know, and we're here, Magento is still a big champion of ours, you know, a big source of investment. And we are looking, and I kind of wear both hats, right? Because I'm a board member of that group as well as being a Magento Adobe employee. But what I, you know, one of the focus that we have is still that collaborative spirit where we sort of, we start to carry the message and the capabilities of this tooling so that we can ensure that this ecosystem remains empowered to deliver the experiences that our customers and their customers expect. Absolutely. Well, Ben, thank you so much for sharing your knowledge and your enthusiasm and passion. Yeah, did that come through? I was hoping. You could next time dial it up a little bit more. Okay, good. That was awesome. And bring more flair. I'll bring more flair next time. Maybe bring more flair for us, Sharon. The capes, I'm still wondering what happened to the capes. Magento master's capes, yes. I can probably go grab you a couple. That would be awesome. Orange is my favorite color. Good to know, good to know. Ben, it's been a pleasure having you on the program, we look forward to next year. Likewise, thank you both. Our pleasure. For Jeff Rick, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live at Magento Imagine 2019 from Vegas. Thanks for watching.