>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas
It's The Cube
covering Adobe Summit 2019
brought to you by Adobe.
>> Hello everyone, welcome back
to The Cube's live coverage here
in Las Vegas for Adobe Summit 2019.
I'm John Furrier with Jeff Brick.
Our next guest is Jason Woosley,
Vice President of Commerce Product and Platform for Adobe,
part of the big keynote display this morning
and news on the announcement
of the commerce cloud, formerly Magento.
Congratulations. Welcome to The Cube.
>> Hey, thanks so much for having me.
It's great to be here.
>> Love the commerce angle
because now that's a big part of a journey,
people buy stuff.
>> Absolutely.
>> That's the most important,
one of the most important parts.
>> So when you think about an experience end to end, right
it culminates hopefully in a transaction,
and that's one of the pieces that makes
the Magento acquisition fit so well
into the Adobe family.
We actually kind of finished that last mile
of the transition getting to actual ownership.
>> You know, I love this event
because it feels a little like Woodstock,
as Steve Lucas said on stage
because you've got the best of big data
all the intoxicating conversations and discussions.
You get the best of the cloud,
all the geek stuff under the hood.
>> Oh, yeah.
>> Then you've got the applications
which are super relevant.
So, it's really kind of, I love the content,
love that you guys are in the middle
of, I think, a great wave of innovation coming.
But if you look at the big picture,
you're seeing the same kind of themes, latency, relevance.
I mean, these are tech terms used
on your product in commerce
a lot different than other things.
So, you start to see these geek terms
kind of weaving into this new cloud.
>> I think you're really starting
to see a convergence of some of the terminology
and what really matters
and that's the customer experience, right.
It's really about answering what the customer wants
and getting that is, that's the magic.
>> It's accepting the fact
that it's a disjointed journey.
I love the journey conversation
but it's not the straight pipe
like it used to be.
You're in and out, you're looking on a website,
you're jumping over from a tweet,
you know, there's so many kind of
in's and out's, in's and out's, in's and outs
before you get to that buy.
>> And consumers are so sophisticated now, right.
I mean they absolutely take advantage
of all of those channels
and that's why it's so important
for merchants who are trying to be relevant.
You've got to be present at every point
where your customers are and it's a tough thing to do
because there's just a proliferation
of channels, I mean, you know,
we've got digital kiosks,
we've got buy online pick up in store,
all these omnichannels operations coming together now.
So it becomes even more important for merchants
to make that investment
and make sure that not only are they
at the place where their customers are
but they're there with a relevant
and personalized message.
>> Jason, I've got to ask you a question.
I bring this up in a lot of these kind of
user experience conversations.
When you have new things coming on the market
that are hard to operationalize as a gate
it takes some time. We're starting to see that with you guys
that built the platform.
People are starting to operationalize new capabilities.
But on the consumer side, the user side,
expectations become the new experience.
It's kind of a cliche in the tech world.
What are some of those experiences
that you're seeing
that's becoming the new expectations.
To your point about, the old way,
I can smell a marketing funnel a mile away.
I'm trying to buy something
and all this other distractions
that are not relevant to me are there.
So you start to see some frustration
but now users expect something new.
What is that expectation
that's converting it to experience?
>> It's across the board
and expectation are sky high, right.
And it seems like every time
we see something innovative
you think about Amazon Prime, right,
two day shipping.
That was crazy back in the day
and now, two day shipping
is considered standard shipping, right.
If you wanna be fast, you're doing same day.
And that kind of, it's so hard to keep up
with that pace of innovation
and it happens all over the place.
It's not just in logistics.
People are expecting to be able
to take advantage of omnichannel operations, right.
Millennials especially.
60% of them really prefer to be able
to have a tangible interaction with the product
before they buy it.
But they still want to buy online.
So now they do buy online pick up in store
or click and collect, they call it in Europe.
And it's just become a huge fad.
We've seen a 250% increase of the largest retailers
of buy online pick up in store in the last year.
Absolutely crazy.
>> It's pretty wild when Best Buy gets on stage
and says, we're not a brick and mortar retailer.
(laughing)
>> It actually changes the game, right.
What else is interesting though is
these brick and mortars that have an online presence,
they actually have a distinct advantage
because of that tangibility, right.
You've got the opportunity
to do all of your shopping online
but you've also got a place to go do showcasing
and actually interact with some of those
especially more high tech tools.
>> Right. >> You guys have been out front
on the Magento side.
We covered your event last year
for the acquisition.
And a couple things popped out at me
that I want to get your reaction to now.
One is obviously the role of the community.
But as you started getting into the cloud kind of play
the economics are changing, too, right.
So you have community, economics and then large scale.
These are new table stakes.
So what's your reaction to that?
How is Adobe and how are your customers adjusting
to this new normal?
Your thoughts on this shift?
>> Yeah, I think that they adjust faster
than we expect them to.
It's really interesting
because as you see these demands
for things like cloud operations.
Really, that's taking a whole set
of responsibilities away from the merchant
and allowing a single vendor
to provide that as a service
and we're seeing that again and again, right.
This service based economy
that's just becoming much, much more prevalent.
What it means for our community
and I'm glad you brought that up
because our commerce community
is the largest in the world,
it's highly engaged.
We have a tremendous amount of participation
from those guys.
And they're actually helping lead the way.
They help merchants feel good
about adopting new technologies.
They're also incredibly innovative
and they take our product and do things
that we would never have thought of.
>> They provide product feedback, too,
the developers, that creates a nice fly wheel.
>> It is a great fly wheel.
>> It's a great use case.
Congratulations, you guys done some nice work there.
>> Oh, thanks, thanks.
>> And Adobe's certainly gonna get the benefits of that.
The other question I wanna ask you
is something I noticed on digital over the years
is that, it's gotten more prevalent
now that everyone's connected.
You know, the old days of buying tech.
Let's buy this great project,
we'll build it out and multiple year payback
and everyone nerds out.
It's like a project
and they have fun doing it.
And then, like, what was the value.
When the value today is about money.
When people lose money, the friction,
all those other kinds of coolness,
the shiny new toy, it goes away.
>> Yeah, it falls away.
>> You're in the middle of that. You see more of that now.
People whose businesses are on the line.
Security breach or revenue.
>> Jason: Yeah.
>> I mean, the optimization around the new way
just goes right to the problem right there.
>> The very best way to tackle that
is an iterative experimental way.
You've go to be able to make small bets.
Learn from those bets and then pivot.
This concept that we can take an idea,
go into our back rooms and code it for three years
and come back out with something that meets the market,
it's a fallacy.
It's never gonna work, right?
So you've gotta start delivering
shippable increments much faster,
smaller pieces and then make sure
that you've got that feedback loop closed
so that you can actually respond to your customers.
>> Jeff: Right, the other piece which you
just talked on briefly
but I wanna unpack it in reference
to what you just said, two big words.
Open source and ecosystem.
>> Jason: Yeah.
>> And as you said, you can't just go in the back room.
Even if you knew the product,
you can't necessarily go in the back room
and build it yourself.
>> Jason: Yeah.
>> Fundamentally, believe that not all the experts
are in your four walls
and that there's, by rule, a lot more outside
and leveraging that capability
is really a game-changer.
>> Yeah, absolutely, I mean, we have
three hundred thousand developers
that call themselves Magento engineers
and don't take a paycheck from Adobe.
It's phenomenal what they're able to do
and they help us move very, very quickly.
We saw last year when the Amazon patent expired
for one-click checkout
on the day that it expired
one of our community members
created a pool request that made every Magento store
able to take advantage of it.
>> John: They were probably waiting
right there on that clock.
>> Oh no, they were waiting.
(John laughing)
Because the licensing fees were extortion.
>> That's innovation.
>> It is.
>> That's our example of community driven innovation.
>> And that's a great place to go get that, right.
Within your four walls, you've got lots of expertise
but you always end up with some blinders on.
We've got profit margins to go chase.
We've got all kinds of good business things to go do.
The community, however, completely unfettered.
They've got the ability to go try all kinds of cool stuff.
>> Two questions on that thread.
One is community.
A lot of people try the buzzword.
Hey, let's get a community.
You can't buy a community.
You've got to earn it.
Talk about that dynamic and then talk about
how Adobe's reacted to Magento's community
because Adobe's pretty open.
>> Yeah.
>> They're creatives.
I don't think they'd be anti-community.
They have developers.
They got a bunch of community themselves.
So, community, buying a community versus earning it,
and then the impact of Magento's community to Adobe.
>> You cannot buy it.
100% you cannot buy a community.
And you have to deserve it.
And really, you have to think about yourselves as custodians
of a community rather than, I mean, we're members.
We used to have this saying, we are Magento.
Everybody inside Magento,
in the ecosystem, our partners, our developers.
Everybody is part of that solution
so trying to own it, trying to exert control over it,
it's a recipe for not having it at all, right.
So you have to be very cautious
and it really is a custodianship.
It's an honor and it's a privilege
and you have to kind of take it seriously.
>> If you get it right, the benefits are multi-fold.
>> That's exactly it.
>> Now, Adobe, obviously they have, we heard and we see
that they're open to that and working with it.
>> Adobe has been terrific and it was, I think,
one of the biggest fears from our community
as acquisition unfolded was hey, Adobe,
big corporate company not a lot of open source projects.
They've got some but their core isn't about open source
and what was gonna happen to our community as we came in.
It's been absolutely terrific
because Adobe has been absolutely investing
and making sure that we continue to be terrific custodians
of this community and in fact,
they're trying now to expand that community
to the rest of their products.
They would love to have our community members
that are able to go out and innovate so rapidly,
do so across the entire Adobe portfolio.
>> Well, it's interesting, too.
If you have a platform play in the cloud scale
and some of these cross functional connection tissue points
that's recipe for robust ecosystem development.
>> Exactly.
>> Because they means there's white space,
there's opportunities to build on top of.
That's a platform.
>> Right, and you will see innovation
and ingenuity from that you'll never expect.
It's just phenomenal.
>> So I'm curious to get your take on a specific feature
I wanna dive into which is dynamic pricing.
Right, hotels have been doing dynamic pricing forever.
You give the authorization to the kid working
at the front counter
if it's 11 o'clock, you got a open room
take whatever walks in the door.
>> Jason: Yeah.
>> To the airline, it's got very sophisticated
but most companies haven't really be able
to excuse dynamic pricing.
Just curious, when you bring in capabilities
that you get now with the Adobe suite
and the data now that you have around the customer
and the data that you now have around the context,
I mean, are we gonna see much better execution
of things like dynamic pricing.
>> We're gonna see democratization of a lot of those things
that were typically reserved
to the very, very big industries, right.
I think you're looking at airlines,
they did a great job.
But they invested hundreds of millions of dollars
into systems to go do that.
Now, with things like Sensei and artificial intelligence
our machine learning capabilities,
we can actually bring those capabilities
to small merchants and everyday folks
to go out and do those experiments with your pricing
and understand where you have elasticity
and where you don't.
Once you have that information,
you're making much better decisions across the board
for your business.
>> And that's actually the benefits of the Magento platform
and scale that you have.
So the question is, as you guys continue
to get this cloud scale going,
what are some of the platforms priorities for you guys?
What product areas you looking at?
What white spaces are gonna leap for the ecosystem?
Can you share a little insight
into what you guys are thinking?
>> Yeah, I mean, one, we try to open everything
to the ecosystem.
There's really not a lot of advantage for us
to have anything that's super closed off and secret sauce.
We try to make sure that everything is available
and so what you'll see is investments
in things like SDK's.
An SDK is software development kit
basically lets you use any language, any tool
that you're comfortable with
to go ahead and integrate, extend and contribute
to our core capabilities.
You'll see us continue to invest in making sure
that everybody that wants to participate
has a very, very easy path to do so.
>> And in terms of the developer program, you mention SDK,
what's your impression of that?
Can you give an update?
We're not really familiar with that much,
we're learning Adobe.
What do you guys have for developer programs within Adobe?
>> Well, it is terrific.
We have a project called Adobe I/O
that actually does a terrific job at sort of
standardizing the API and interfaces
between all of the different components
within the digital experience suite.
So, you'll continue to see us investing in that.
Certainly, commerce is gonna start participating
in that Adobe I/O model
and that's going to make it even more broadly available
to these great folks.
>> Even one of the things we had
on The Cube today was a historic moment.
We been doing this for 10 years, hundreds of shows a year.
We had our first guest on,
one of your customers from Metlite.
His title was Marketing CIO
and I'm like, okay.
He's part of the global
technology operations team of Metlite.
But I think the bigger story there
is that we think we'll be a bigger trend
than just one-off.
We think, we're seeing the connection between the IT world,
data, developers, applications coming together
where marketing is like a CIO.
>> And it's exactly right.
We look at the CMO and the CIO
as two sides of the same coin.
And more often than not they have the same objectives.
They're coming at it from a slightly different perspective
and so you really do end up having to marry the message
so that it resonates not only with the IT folks
and usually that's about cloud processes,
ease of use, ease of deployment,
low cost operation and then
on the marketing side
it's really about feature availability
and visual merchandising and being able
to bring their great products to life.
>> And an interesting quote, he said, what's it like,
to be a marketing CIO, share to others
who might to be that.
He goes, well, I'm kind of a matchmaker and a translator.
(laughing)
>> I think that's pretty good a way to put it.
Yeah, that makes good sense.
>> He puts projects together,
translating jargon to business benefits.
Emphasis was on the business.
You got to know the business.
We had Dollar Shape Club on earlier,
another one of your Adobe's customers.
They were like, no, we need to know the business.
It's about the data, data processing,
the data systems, business.
It has to be blended.
It's the art and science of business and technology.
>> Yeah, the only get that right
when you put the customer right in the middle.
You have to build all of those business processes
and all of those systems around what
that customer's looking for.
>> So I'm just curious, Jason, what's changed
over the last couple of years, 'cos we've been talking
about the 360 view of the customer since, I don't when,
but a while.
>> A while, yeah.
>> And we've been talking about omnichannel marketing
and touching the customer for a while
but it seems like we've hit a tipping point.
Maybe I'm misreading the tealeaves but you know,
what are the kind of critical factors
that are making that much more a reality
than just talk it was a couple years back?
>> Well, on omnichannel, we're certainly seeing a maturity,
an understanding of what it takes to do omnichannel.
It's not just a commerce operation.
omnichannel actually stretches back into your supply chain.
To be able to really think about
the way you deliver to customers
as a single channel.
Your supply chain has to be highly flexible.
Your logistic capabilities have to be extremely flexible
and they have to be able to tuned for the things
that are important to your customers.
Either speed of delivery or cost of delivery.
All of those kinds of things.
In the omnichannel space, I think we're finally
starting to see the maturity of,
okay, how do we make these things real.
And that's critically important.
And the other one.
>> 360, 360 view of the customer.
>> 360 view of the customer.
Almost the same thing there, right.
We're finally seeing the technology start to catch up
and the big challenge there was
we always had one view or the other.
You either had a behavioral view of your customer,
how they interact with your content.
Or you had this great transactional view,
the dollar and cents behind a relationship.
Now, we're starting to see companies
especially like Adobe,
that have made these incredible investments
to bring those two houses of data together,
and that really starts to tell the full story.
Again, going back to that customer journey,
you need to be able to observe that entire journey
in order to make those kinds of decisions.
>> Jason, I wish we had more time.
I wanna get one more question.
I know we might wanna break here.
Maybe we can follow up
as a separate conversation in Palo Alto.
You know, having a digital footprint
you hear that buzzword,
I'll get a digital footprint out there.
It makes a lot of sense
but a world that has been dominated by silos,
it's hard to have footprint when you have siloed entities.
So, in your mind, your reaction
between something that's foundational
and then data silos.
Maybe silos could be okay at the app level
but what's the foundational footprint?
I mean, foundation's everything.
>> Jason: It is.
>> Without a foundation, you clearly can't build on.
>> Yeah, and we talked a little bit
about the Adobe experience platform this morning.
Eric Shantenu and Anje will come on and talk about,
we've got this amazing capability now
to really take that data,
standardize it and make it available
for all kinds of systems and processes.
And I think that's where you're going
to see the real foundation for all of these siloed efforts.
It's gonna be in this kind of common data understanding,
what they call a XDM.
>> And customers got silos, too. They've got agencies.
All kinds of things out there.
>> Absolutely. >> Data everywhere.
Jason, thanks for coming on.
We really appreciate it.
>> Hey, guys, I really appreciate it. Thanks so much.
>> Jason Woosley on The Cube here at Adobe Summit 2019.
I'm John Furrier.
Day one of two days of wall-to-wall live coverage.
Stay with us for more coverage after this short break.
(electronic music)