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The Future of Project Firefly: B2B and B2C Expansion

Almost a year ago, we launched the developer preview program for a new third-party developer capability called Project Firefly. If you haven’t heard of Firefly, the simplest way to explain is this: Firefly is a complete framework for building cloud-native applications that extend Adobe enterprise solutions and run on Adobe’s infrastructure.

I remember how we all felt at launch time — both excited and anxious about what the customer feedback would be. Since then, we’ve seen multiple signs that we were right to be excited — hundreds of customers applied to the program, creating thousands of Firefly projects, with many customers going into production even though Firefly is still in developer preview!

You can check out all of the milestones Firefly has crossed over the past year in our post, Project Firefly Update: New Features, More Use Cases, Continued Support. Here are some of the key reasons why customers have been so quick to embrace Firefly:

  • Enterprises have adopted “cloud native” as the way to develop new applications and moved away from solutions that require on-prem stacks and monolith apps. Firefly is all about building cloud-native applications.
  • Firefly is built with industry standards — serverless, single page apps, Jamstack, Node.js, GitHub, CLI — which translates to a minimal ramp up effort for any developer looking to use it. We’ve heard over and over again that developers today want to learn technologies and not products.
  • Firefly offers core capabilities out of the box that are needed for modern apps (compute, storage, events, CDN, CI/CD, application lifecycle management), a guided onboarding experience (CLI with code generators to bootstrap fully functional applications), and it is extensible by customers. This translates to faster time to value from a customer perspective.
  • Firefly offers a consistent mechanism for extending Adobe enterprise solutions — regardless of which Adobe product you want to integrate with or extend.

What is the team working on now?

We have two big buckets of features in the works — improving existing capabilities and expanding the number of use cases.

For the first release, our focus was on two big use cases around one persona — the enterprise developer working in-house or for a partner hired by a customer:

  • Microservices — applications that have no UI and that typically act as a bridge between two systems. For example, a microservice that ingests assets from a legacy system into Adobe Experience Manager
  • Business-to-employee (B2E) web applications surfaced on experience.adobe.com–An example would be a custom dashboard that offers a different visualization for data stored in Adobe Analytics

What is coming in Project Firefly?

While these use cases are important, it became clear that we can offer even more value if we are expanding to business-to-consumer (B2C) or business-to-business (B2B) use cases and enable a new persona, the business user.

Today, a customer can use a Firefly app only if a developer is involved and that app was published within the customer organization context. We want to enable partners to publish Firefly apps to Adobe Exchange and let business users discover and select the apps they want to enable for their organizations — in this scenario, there is no developer involved in the enablement part.

Looking at B2C/B2B expansion, the same modern approach Firefly uses for B2E use cases can be leveraged for projects that deal with building digital experiences with or without commerce capabilities. From a developer point of view, you have one tool to implement both back-office customizations and integrations and customer facing experiences.

All these new capabilities will provide plenty of value for our customers and partners. But to be completely honest, we are not planning to stop here because Adobe has Document Cloud and Creative Cloud too. Stay tuned for more news on this.

Learn more about Project Firefly

Read more about Project Firefly on our website. We also regularly host office hours for Firefly customers. Bring any questions you may have at upcoming office hours.

Sign up for the free virtual Adobe Summit this week (April 27–29) and check out the new Developer Ecosystem track, which features Adobe I/O and Firefly sessions.

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