Hello Adobe! Goodbye Magento?
A 2018 Magento Live Review.
The venue: Barcelona.
The first (and last? Hello Adobe!) European Magento conference took place in Barcelona from October 8th to 10th. Barcelona is becoming the digital hub in Europe for all kinds of companies and such it was a great choice to host the event in the vibrant city of Barcelona (go see the Font Màgica de Montjuïc if you have the chance). Around 2500 people came together to hear the latest updates around Adobes plans, exchange ideas, learn, meet and party.
The major topic: Adobe makes every moment shoppable.
As anyone in the ecommerce / tech world should have noticed by now: Adobe aquired Magento — the missing piece for Adobe and the Adobe Experience Cloud to be recognised as the major provider of a fully integrated software suite to provide the entire journey from content creation and analytics to marketing and commerce. Adobe hereby aquired not only ecommerce credibility, but got access to a huge ecosystem of developers and industry and solution partners.
The brand Magento.
“..will stay for the foreseeable future”. These were the exact words used by Magento during the Partner Summit. The brand value of Magento sure is signficant and the importance of the community was highlighted mutiple times. However, my personal opinion is that the brand will disappear within the next 6 to 12 months and that the product Magento will be rebranded as Adobe Commerce Cloud and fully integrated into the Adobe Experience Cloud. Does anyone remember Demandware? Right, it’s now Salesforce Commerce Cloud.
“ Magento, an Adobe company, is now part of Adobe Experience Cloud, bringing together digital commerce, order management, and predictive intelligence into a unified experience platform. And it’s the only commerce platform to integrate both B2B and B2C experiences. Now the entire journey — from content creation and analytics to marketing and commerce — is integrated into one cloud platform.” (source: Adobe Website)
Cloud first.
Magento’s (eehm.. Adobe’s) focus is “Cloud”. No marketing slides even mentioned the Magento Commerce on premise version. Well, actually the on premise version is the exact same piece of software that Magento offers in its cloud solution, just not bundled with the cloud services. Being asked whether the commerce on premise version will still be available, Magentos answer was “yes, for specific situations where the cloud product cannot be applied”. The Magento Commerce Cloud Edition provides a sophistacted set of tools to make it as easy as possible to get developers up and running developing for M2 Cloud.
Magento Open Source Edition.
Will it stay? Will it be maintained? Honestly, I don’t know and as it’s open source obviously the community can take the product further and will not suddenly disappear. But I doubt that after integrating Magento in the Adobe Experience Cloud that a separate product Magento Open Source will be maintained by Adobe in the long run. However, this is pure speculation from my end.
Headless Magento and Integration into Adobe Experience Cloud.
Adobe provided precise insights on how Magento will be integrated into the Adobe Experience Cloud. Magento will run headless as a backend service behind a layer of APIs and microservices. Magentos functionality and commerce business logic will be available through Adobe’s Commerce Integration Framework. The CIF on Cloud services architecture is based on OpenWhisk & Adobe I/O Runtime.
Being asked what happens to Magentos frontend initiatives like the Page Builder that will be released in Magento 2.3 or the Magento PWA studio, Adobe answered not very specific but between the lines I heard it will be merged with their existing products that provide similar (better) functionality. To me it seems Adobe will step by step modularize Magentos business logic and create microservices out of it that then will be included in the existing micro services layer of the Adobe Experience Cloud. That way, finally, Magento (ehhm.. Adobe) enters the world of modern micro service architectures.
Chances for Adobe: Access to SMB market and commerce for large enterprises.
The Adobe Experience Cloud is used at large enterprises. With the aquisition of Magento, Adobe got better access to the SMB segment. If Adobe sees this as a chance and offers attractive pricing and packing of Adobe Experience Cloud for the SMB segment traction could be gained in that segment. At the same time, more large enterprises might consider the Adobe Experience Cloud because it now includes a professional commerce solution.
Magento 2.3
Independent of forementioned plans of integrating Magento into the Adobe Experience Cloud, Magento 2.3 will hit the market November 2018 and it comes with a significant amount of new functionality (some even refer to it as Magento 3).
The release includes Magento Payments, Page Builder (available as payed extension, formerly known als BlueFoot CMS), Graph QL, PWA Studio, Amazon Sales Channel, Google Ad Channel, etc.
You should definitely check out Adobe Experience Cloud. Maybe here is a good starting point.
Thank you, Magento and Adobe for making this event possible. Thanks for the talks, infos, sparring and partying.
A lot of things happened these 3 days. You just read a short summary of my most important takeaways. More insights on everything that happened in Barcelona (not all of these need to stay in Barcelona, we’re not in Vegas here) can be found below in the reviews of our colleagues and friends from other companies.
Links to other reviews
Über Sitewards
Sitewards ist ein führendes Dienstleistungsunternehmen für die Konzeption und Umsetzung innovativer E-Commerce-Plattformen und marktbezogener Digitalisierungsaktivitäten. Das Portfolio umfasst die Bereiche Strategieberatung, User Experience Design sowie Softwareentwicklung und -betrieb.
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