>> live from Las Vegas it's the cube,
covering Magento Imagine 2019.
Brought to you by Adobe.
>> Hey welcome back to the cube,
Lisa Martin with Jeff Frick live at The Wynn Las Vegas
for Magento Imagine 2019, with about 3500 people here
give or take a few.
We're very pleased to welcome Magento evangelist Ben Marks
to the Cube, Ben welcome
>> 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 the core of Magento since its inception
the very humble beginnings that it had back in back in 2007
has been this 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,
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,
has always been the x-factor in Magento
and so 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,
is part of this 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 timer, first isn't the right word
but open source neutral or pro,
along with your proprietary stuff
and to really engage developers it's such a special town
and as 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.
How've you been able to maintain that?
And what is kind of the secret sauce?
Why are the developers so passionate
to continue to develop a 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
time working on their platform versus a different one.
>> Yeah, well you know it's endemic to our culture
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 we've always had
at the underpinning everything
has been this open source ethos.
So from the very beginnings of Magento,
the creators Roy Rubin and Yoav 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 the force multiplier.
Again the thing that would get them into markets
that they couldn't address with their very small agency
that they were walking 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 the general open source ethos there.
But I learned about open source from Magento,
I had someone help me out when I was first starting
at my first week working with Magento as a developer
there was no documentation, I had to go into a chatroom
and ask for help and this guy he actually spent
about a couple of 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 this guy from outside of Heidelberg
he's just no this is open source,
is like just as you learn give it back.
And that's a perfect summation
for a big part of the spirit here.
It helps who are in commerce,
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 sass platforms
there's nothing wrong with some of the 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, guess what?
You got to go with the 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 in to today?
>> So I have a good counterpart over Alberto Dobby
and it's a stretch 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 Asay probably...
>> CUBE alum
>> ...if you follow tech online, you've seen this post,
you've seen him as an postulating on open source
and it was interesting
a lot of us were asking the same question from Magento world
because a lot of us remembere the eBay days
and an eBay had a 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 it's the natural progression
from private equity ownership
but really, where is this open source
that we were told about?
And Matt is a kind of a big a piece there
but as it turns out he jumped on Twitter immediately
when none of us was 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 visited with with several
of our team members in the Basel office
and there are Apache Software Foundation board members.
I mean you want to to talk about the beginnings of open source
and the impact its had on the world?
These are some of these people
and so yes it's there I think it's not a secret to say
that Adobe really hasn't done a great job
of telling that story.
So 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 it's been really interesting watching them
and encounter this and then start to 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 his
Trevi a week cover, CNCF and will be a cube con
I think next week and in Barcelona
so we're huge advocates,
but 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
and really build this develop wrapped advocacy
is a really tremendous asset.
>> Better together, is what we say,
and it could not be true.
I mean there there is no way we could know at all,
we can't hope to.
So what we've done actually in the last couple of years
really under some brilliant leadership by Jason Woosley
we've been able to double down on our open-source investment
and I'd say that was a 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 is that they're all experts in their individual domains
so that line of code that some contributor from somewhere
is contributing, he or she has become an expert
let's say in something as glamorous like totals 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.
>> So significant impacts in a very short period of time.
>> Yeah 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
We've 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
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 that's not even the story
the story is everything else I talked about
which is just that degree of ownership
that degree of informed engineering
that we would never come up with on our own.
And it was a real signal
to this very patient
and resilient ecosystem that hey,
we're all in this together.
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
and even to the point where our core architecture team
now all of their discussions
so you can go to github.com/magento,
you can see our backlog,
you could 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
the highest stage I believe of open source evolution.
>> That's a great story now the other great thing
though that it don't be 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 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.
Urgent 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 rights.
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 like 14 trillion transactions
that are captured in our various apparatus
and I think that it's tremendous responsibility,
it's tremendous power.
And if we 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
not just at the forefront of where commerce evolves
but really to set the standard
that consumers begin to expect.
And I know we've all felt it,
when you have when you have that experience
and it feels very full of friction
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 are kind of a partner on my journey
that's where I mean that's we're going to spend my time
and my money and that's really what we're trying
to really lean into here.
>> Which is essential, because as you mentioned
if I'm doing something on my phone
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 is 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 of the business needs
to truly manage the customer experience is a game changer.
>> Yap it is so what we're what we're looking to these days
you know Magento, just before the acquisition was announced
made a tremendous investment to start up
it's completely independent trade association
called the Magento Association.
It's a place for our community to collect under.
And and when we're here and Magento is still a big champion
of ours a big source of investment
and we are you know 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 one of the focus that we have is still
that collaborative spirit where
we start to carry the message and the capabilities
of this tooling so that we can ensure that this ecosystem
remains and powered 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.
>> Awesome and bring more flair.
>> I'll bring more flair next time.
[Lisa Mumbling]
>> I'm still wondering what happened to the capes?
>> The magician master capes yes.
>> I can I can probably go grab you a couple.
>> That would be awesome orange is my favorite color.
>> 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
and you are watching theCube live
at Magento imagine 2019 from Vegas.
Thanks for watching.
(upbeatmusic)