Magento Live Europe Amsterdam — Adobe takes over and pushes digital commerce to the next level
Making every moment shoppable
Let’s start with a big thank you to all the folks at Adobe and Magento for pulling off this amazing gathering of thousands of digital minds in Amsterdam and enabling the Magento community to leverage the new capabilites provided by integrating Magento into the Adobe world.
Hello, Adobe.
Wait, purple? Right. The well-known Magento orange is about to disappear. There is no official statement from Magento or Adobe marketing, but first thing I noticed when entering the venue is that Adobe is doing a very clever job by phasing out the Magento brand. The Magento orange appears “here and there” as graphical elements on program flyers, signs, visuals but the dominant color was purple. Adobe Commerce Cloud is the new name of Magento Commerce Cloud when being sold to enterprise clients, whereas Magento Commerce still stands as product name as long as its sold to SMBs. I personally expect the Magento brand to disappear step by step.
Making every moment shoppable: Adobe Experience Manager integrates smoothly with Magento Commerce Cloud and delivers amazing capabilities.
I had the chance to look behind the beautifully crafted marketing slides and got my hands on an Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) installation that is integrated with Magento Commerce Cloud. Dave Uselton, Sr. Consultant at Adobe walked me through the possibilities and technical details. I remember thinking ‘wow — THIS is how (visual) content editing and publishing is supposed to be in 2019’.
So how does this work? Get an AEM License/Account (as Adobe Solution Partner you can request a JAR file (yes, AEM runs on Java) through the partner portal, as a potential client they might give you trial access to a cloud instance I guess). Get access to a Magento Commerce Cloud (or on-prem) instance. Provide AEM with credentials to the Magento GraphQL endpoint. AEM comes with a frontend template (Venia) that covers already a good portion of Magento functionality, so you now can directly start dragging / editing content visually (you can think of AEMs editing capabilties as Magentos Page Builder on steroids). In this scenario AEM will deliver the frontend, Magento just acts as headless commerce backend.
The combination of AEM/Magento Commerce allows merchants to create, edit, publish marketing content as smoothly as you can propably think of AND make that content shoppable (= e.g. having an add-to-cart button directly next to your marketing content). Also, AEM seamlessly integrates with other Adobe solutions and can push pictures directly to Adobe Photoshop for editing, etc. You can add all kinds of publishing channels to AEM. One could be a Magento Commerce instance, another one, within the same AEM account, could be screens across Las Vegas.
Summing things up: When you go for AEM/Magento Commerce your content editing / publishing issues are gone. However, your money is too, as annual license fees might (disclaimer: guesswork here!) start at a 6-digit number. Adobe provides a lot of value for the money, so I think it is worth the invest in most cases, however smaller merchants might not be able to pay the license. At the same time Adobe stated multiple times they want to get more clients in the SMB sector so let’s see what they are about to offer. Btw: Adobe has 25+ offices in Europe wheras Magento always lacked a good presence in Europe. I am excited this all is changing, bringing us all more opportunities and professionalism in all dimensions, especially software, marketing and sales.
Magento Cloud now also runs on Azure.
Adobe Sensei product recommendations!
Adobe announced the availability of Adobe Sensei product recommendations for Magento. It’s an AI-driven SaaS service that generates product recommendations based on how users browse your site, what they shop for and other metrics. Basically, you install a Magento extension provided by Adobe, configure it and here you go: product recommendations, AI-driven. The extension comes with a SaaS-export module that pushes the required product and browsing behaviour information to Adobe Sensei (GDPR compliant, of course) to enable the service to calculate proper product recommendations which are then displayed on product detail pages, start pages or wherever you would like to see those on your site. Just another example of what the existing Adobe world of products is capable of and how those can be leveraged when mashed up with Magento.
Adobe swag.
I got myself an Adobe hoodie. I just had to. Adobe impressed me and well… I’ve seen Magento orange for a while, got all kinds of Magento swag and..I love new things.
Sitewards is now officially recognized as Adobe Solution Partner.
Being Magento Solution partner since years we are now recognized as Adobe Solution Partner (our listing on their partner page might take a few days), so feel free to approach us for any questions around the Adobe world of products, especially AEM and Magento integration. We expect the 2 partner programs to merge some time in 2020.
Stripe
The stripe guys deeply impressed me. Not only is their line of payment products / services cutting edge, they also published 6 books as of now which you can buy at press.stripe.com. From growth hacking your company to building high performance engineering teams to building communities. Practical advice from their experiences that directly brings you forward, whether you are a CEO, CTO some other C with an O, software developer, project manager, marketing lead. They gave all books away for free at their booth — a big thank you for that. I am half way through the High Growth Handbook by Elad Gil. Also, have a look at increment.com — Stripes monthly magazin about all things around delivering digital software. You are an agency? Subscribe for the monthly magazines!
Adyen
Adyen just won the DevPortal award for developer friendliness of their API documentation and their API explorer. This is absolutely the right approach. If you want to be successful in the digital space, amaze the developer community. Also, Adyen won my personal unofficial “MLEU” award by taking us to one of the best restaurants in Amsterdam — from plant to plate. If you’re serious about payment matters, Adyen is the place to go!
Wait, what about the after show parties?
What happens in Amsterdam stays in Amsterdam, let’s just say we were there (most of us, our CTO preferred to learn for Magento 2 Solution Partner specialist and PASSED the exam! Congrats, Anton!) and shout out a big thank you to Magento (or Adobe?) for the after show party, my cousin Linus for suggesting to go see paradiso.nl, Airways for rocking the show and Amsterdam for being Amsterdam. Thank you, Rebecca and Anton for enjoying the event together.
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