After 5 days in Europe for Magento Live Amsterdam, I am flying back to Boston and reflecting on the event. Here are my Top Takeaways from the event:
1. Magento Is Being Tightly Integrated Into The Adobe Offering
The Adobe and Magento senior management team spent a lot of time talking about where Magento “sits†within the Adobe portfolio and how the company will be going to market with their new(ish) acquisitions. Magento and Marketo will be aligned within the Adobe Commerce Cloud along with existing Adobe products. In addition to messaging, there are organizations and program changes being rolled out. For example, the Magento partner program will be rolled into the Adobe partner program.
2. There Is A Huge Investment Being Made In Magento 2 Functionality & Skills
Jason Woosley presented the Magento roadmap and there is a wealth of functionality being developed across the Magento footprint. From PWA (Progressive Web App) themes to new B2B features, to enhanced Cloud capabilities and Personalization via Sensai, there are a lot of new features and functionality under development.
In addition to the new functionality, Magento has added a lot of new technical support resources. This is especially exciting as many of them will be focused on enhanced technical documentation plus Cloud support.
3. Adobe And Magento Have A Well Defined Segmentation Strategy
When Adobe acquired Magento, many people were concerned that it would be positioned to focus solely on big enterprises. Adobe will still go after big companies (Enterprise: >$1B), but they will also have a mid-market segment (Commercial Midmarket: $50m – $1B) and a SMB segment (Commercial SOHO/SMB: <$50m). Marketo and Magento will be offered to all segments, but the Commercial Midmarket will be the sweet spot (and a natural fit for agencies like Accorin).
4. Progressive Web Apps, Progressive Web Apps, Progressive Web Apps
There were a LOT of mentions of PWAs (Progressive Web Apps) and the importance of rolling them out (speed & User Experience). Demos were shown of PWAs that have been deployed into Production and they are very fast. There is also quite a lot of focus by the community on building PWA themes. PWAs for B2B functionality are coming….though were are not 100% there yet.
5. Strong European Community
If the speakers and my conversations with other participants were anything to go by, the European Magneto community is very strong and growing. From the number of European certifications and the Open Source contributions to the agencies team members that I spoke to, Europe has a very strong Magento ecosystem.
6. Sensei
Abode has invested considerably in Artificial Intelligence (AI) development and this investment is benefitting the Magento product. The first AI integration for Magento will be focused on product personalization (ie. recommendation widgets for “you might likeâ€, “other people also boughtâ€, etc.). This will launch in early 2020 and will be included as part of Magento Commerce (for free). Future capabilities will include enhanced merchandising, advanced search, and more.
7. Big B2B Push
As there was in 2019, there will be a significant focus on the B2B market and an aggressive product roadmap in 2020. Mark Brinton highlighted many of the changes being added to the platform. Some of them will make the existing functionality more robust, while others are totally new. These include PWA for B2B, GraphQL capabilities for B2B use cases, Order Approvals (very excited), catalog refinements, escalation on quotes, and company address books.
8. Magento 2 Certification Is Important But Not Easy
To be a certified Magento partner you need to have Magento experts on-staff and be certified on the platform. Accorin has 11 Certified Magento 2 team members. Certification requires your team to have both hands-on experiences as well as pass the Magento Certification tests, and it is not easy. I spoke to a few other agency executives about their certification experience. There is a common refrain; it takes time and an investment in training, and it is difficult to carve out the time when you are busy…..but prospects seem to understand the value of Certified Magento professionals.
Bottom Line
Adobe is moving full-steam ahead with Magento and will continue to invest in the platform’s growth. Everything I saw in at Magento Live 2019 in Amsterdam points to Magento being the leading global e-commerce platform leader for years to come.
