Introduction to Adobe Commerce

Transcript

All right, Justin. Awesome. So turn my camera on for a moment. Just say hello to everybody dialing in from Austin, Texas. Really great to see you all and thank you very much for taking the time to spend with us today. I know it’s a lot to ask. So the whole idea here is to kind of set the tone and level set our knowledge before we really dive into the deep technical aspect of these innovations. And you know, I’m not going to spend a whole lot of time. I’ve got about 10, maybe 12 minutes total. But I really think it’s important to make sure we’re all operating from the same set of knowledge. You know, like there’s been an extraordinary amount of investment and innovation made in the Adobe Commerce platform in the past two or three years. And hopefully we can capture a lot of that in today’s session. So again, we know the time is valuable. We’ll go ahead and give you the key takeaways right here at the top of the presentation. But you know, the main thing we want you to leave this, at least my portion with, is realizing that Adobe Commerce is absolutely in our eyes an enterprise solution. You know, we really cover just a vast wide variety of, I’m going to turn my camera off. I got some stuttering. We cover, you know, just a vast ecosystem. We cover multiple industries, really just any sort of commerce use case that our partners or customers can think of. We’ve got a path forward for you. Adobe Commerce really is a modern, robust, highly performant solution. And that underlying extensibility architecture, which is what we’re really going to focus mostly on today, is really great, in my opinion. And it’s something that like really supports the customization of that core application without having to compromise really anything very different than you might have been familiar with even four or five years ago. Right. Finally, you know, we feel like it is one of the most feature complete and technologically robust applications in the market. And hopefully as we go through the conversation today, you’ll kind of agree with this. So jumping right into it. Can’t have a webinar without the obligatory NASCAR slide, right? So I’ll be brief here. You know, sure, it’s a cliche, but really, as you can see, Adobe Commerce really is being used to deliver, I mean, excellent commerce experiences across a very wide set of regions, industries and use cases. This slide doesn’t really do it justice. This is kind of a snapshot. We’re really going to explore some of these customer success stories a little more in detail later on in the session. But to kick things off, I wanted to pick two that I found particularly interesting and two that kind of align with the technical nature of today’s conversation. So I’ll start with Coca-Cola. They successfully deployed Adobe Commerce to create a digital shopping experience during the pandemic, and they modernized an archaic 10-year-old order fulfillment process. They did that with Adobe Commerce. As a result, they also saw an 18% uptick in AOV and a 3X growth in site traffic overall. And the reason I selected this, this one to kind of kick it off is I just think it’s a great customer success story to highlight because it really shows how Adobe Commerce can be used to strategically and rapidly bring a business into the modern era, which isn’t really one of the key value props that you may have heard from some of the sales conversations you’ve had. Another really cool brand that I just like personally and like to highlight is Volkswagen. Really a cool story, very similar to Coca-Cola in that they were able to deploy Adobe solutions like Adobe Experience Manager, Sites and Assets, and Adobe Commerce to quickly stabilize and improve an entire digital ecosystem. They deployed AEM Sites and Adobe Commerce in a few short months, I want to say like eight or ten short months, and they did that to really create a comprehensive digital experience for quickly finding and purchasing OEM and aftermarket parts, which is historically somewhat of a difficult ask. There’s just a lot of complexity in that data set, right? But the key relevance here, in my opinion, is that both Coca-Cola and Volkswagen are using Adobe Commerce in conjunction with other Adobe solutions to build a future-proof, highly extensible technical backbone for their businesses. Again, we’ll take a look at a few more case studies later on in today’s session, but rest assured, Adobe Commerce is a full-fledged enterprise solution designed to facilitate nearly any commerce use case in the market. So taking a look at things from kind of a different lens, more of a timeline lens, you know, as someone who’s been working with the Adobe Commerce platform since late 2007, like many of you on the call, I can personally say that there’s never been a more exciting time than now. Just the amount of innovations and updates and partnerships that we seem to roll out frequently, it just really, really warms my heart to see this. You know, the innovations are delivered rapidly, and from what I can tell internally, it shows no sign of slowing down. A little bit of a funny story, I feel like almost on a weekly basis now, I have to kind of stay on top of learning some new integration points, some new partnership we have, some new feature we’re rolling out, you know, some sort of improvement in regard to deployments. And it keeps my job, it keeps me on my toes. Let’s just put it that way. It’s causing a bit of whiplash. And that’s great to see because it’s just week after week after week, we get just constant innovation pumped into this platform. So it’s really great to see the solution become, in my opinion, fully actuated and start to lean on those industry leading concepts like microservices, low code customizations through things like App Builder, and just really broad API coverage. I mean, this is really the state of modern applications, you know, and this really, this continued innovation and investment really does ensure that our merchants and integrators have the flexibility required to deploy the exact solution their respective businesses demand. And that’s huge. That’s kind of what we deem as flexibility. So when you hear us talk about Adobe Commerce as a flexible platform, that’s really the core sentiment we want to convey. So if we explore the Adobe Commerce cloud stack from a bird’s eye view, and again, bear with me, guys, we’re kind of starting from the top level setting knowledge and getting much more granular as the conversation goes forward. You know, from this slide here, we can really see that it is kind of purpose built for flexibility and integration from the ground up, just like all other modern tech stacks, you know, we support multiple front ends, you know, PWAs, headless, all that supported. We have a really robust set of API coverage and integration points that we’ll talk about a little further in the conversation. And all of this sits atop a automated platform designed to reduce the overhead required to deploy and maintain an enterprise application. You know, like, let’s be honest, there’s a lot of people required to deploy and maintain these solutions. So we try to do our part and, and kind of automate and streamline and de-risk as many of those components as we can. Sorry, I’m not sure what’s not progressing. There we go. So, clicking one level deeper, you know, we can really see that we’re also leveraging industry leading technologies from a single easy to manage solution that’s really optimized to deliver scale, agility, and cost savings across the board. I won’t go into all of these individual technologies. You can easily read about these on Experience League, etc. But the key thing I’d like to leave you with here is that the Adobe Commerce Cloud solution offers all of the benefits of modern cloud computing, while still providing extreme flexibility in how you customize, deploy. And honestly, as you’ll see a little later, even how you develop. And I think, again, that’s our unique viewpoint on quote unquote flexibility as we kind of go to market with this. All right, so in addition to that auto or that, you know, that cloud infrastructure, we also include many pivotal technologies for auto scaling things like blue-green deployments, which is currently in alpha testing. And we do this from a single view of the applications. And this allows, you know, a multitude of people working on an application to kind of see the same thing all at once, right? So you have one cohesive place where you can go to see performance metrics. Hey, what’s the latest security scan results? These are just tools that we include out of the box for everybody. Now, what does this mean for you as a person who is a very likely a technical resource at one of our top integrators? I mean, honestly, it means a lot of things. But in my opinion, it means faster issue resolution, less DevOps on your plate so that your developers can really focus on the task at hand. I really do think it creates an enhanced communication workstream between the implementer and any sort of management staff and in customers, right? So having one cohesive place where you can kind of get a snapshot of the application, a production application, is really valuable because that really leads to, at the end of the day, much higher quality deployments and just happier shared customers all around. So again, you can learn a lot more about all of these great tools included out of the box online. But I do think it’s important as we kind of build our level setting, or we start to level set our knowledge to kind of understand, hey, outside of the development aspect, what is included with this thing when you purchase an Adobe Commerce Cloud license? So benchmarking, this is huge for anybody that’s actually deploying or maintaining applications. I’m not going to read through the metrics here, but it is worth noting that performance and benchmarking is taken very seriously internally. And we really continue to innovate as new technologies, methodologies are made available to the market. So we can’t claim that we invented blue-green deployments, right? But what we can say is that we really invest heavily in making sure that when a new thing comes to market and would benefit our application and our collective customers, we really try to make sure that it’s easily implementable by all of our partner ecosystem as well. Rest assured, everyone on the call today is going to receive a lot of kind of great assets to dive into further. One of them is going to be a performance and benchmarking white paper. So hopefully that provides some additional insight for you to kind of learn more about those upper limits of a cloud solution like Adobe Commerce. So finally, before we jump more into the architecture side of things, tooling is very important. I do come from an engineering and architecture background, and I would assume most of today’s audience is technical. So tooling and more importantly, the toolbox at our disposal is pretty important, right? From your IDE to your browser of choice, I mean, it’s really important to have purpose-built tools at the ready so you can start to build these solutions quickly. And honestly, Adobe Commerce is no different. We provide helpful portals that outline exactly what the application is doing from a performance and a security standpoint. We also provide a really long list of DevOps-centric tooling to simplify upgrades and the application of patches and just kind of the tedium that comes with deploying an enterprise application. So again, all of that is included with the Adobe Commerce solution. All right, so now that we’re kind of level-set it on our overall knowledge of the platform, let’s kind of go one level deeper and start to explore that underlying architecture and key use cases. And again, in my opinion, this will really kind of prime all of our brains to really understand some of the key concepts from more of a technical standpoint later on in the conversation. So again, your time is valuable. The key messages we want you to take away from here as we start to explore the architecture is Adobe Commerce can integrate into headless solutions, Adobe Experience Manager being the most predominant. But remember, if you have Sitecore, Contentful, Drupal, Acquia, I mean, really we support a multitude of different third-party front ends and really whatever you need to deliver the best experience for your customer, Adobe Commerce has a path forward for you. We also deliver high-intent first-party data to other digital experience cloud products. We’ll see a little bit more about this a little later, but this is really designed to enhance those marketing journeys and analytics. We also have an entirely serverless extensible framework. You know, and this is for anybody who’s been working with the platform for 10 plus years, you can see this is kind of a huge step forward and Adobe has made substantial investments over the past four or five years to really make sure that it is aligned with the latest and greatest serverless extensibility frameworks, you know. It finally goes without saying, but it really is a robust, highly adopted solution. As you remember from our quintessential NASCAR slide, I mean, we just cover such an unbelievably broad set of industries, verticals, revenue bands, you know, niche use cases. We really have a solution for everybody. All right, so one big architecture slide. I know how the technical audience typically gravitates towards this, so don’t feel like you have to screenshot it. We’re going to send all this to everybody on the call today, but I do think it is important to kind of pause here for a moment and explore integration from these four distinct angles. Sure, there’s kind of other angles to explore it from, but for the sake of time, I think these are the four most relevant. And honestly, all of these kind of stem from that robust API coverage through GraphQL, REST, and SOAP, right? That’s kind of the quote unquote backbone of everything. So starting from the top there, Adobe Commerce easily integrates with other front ends like AEM sites, Contentful, Sitecore, Drupal, Acquia, et cetera, you name it. Clockrise from there, you can see that we have strong pre-integrations to our Adobe Experience platform. And in my opinion, this kind of provides what I would call like a handshake between other solutions like RT-CDP, Analytics, Target, et cetera. We’re going to take a look at that further coming up here in a moment. Now at the bottom, in that kind of six o’clock position, you’ll notice that we have an entire low code development backbone designed to quickly insert customizations into the application via really commonplace technologies like JavaScript. So this whole idea that you need to have a bunch of PHP experts on staff, that this is really no longer the case. Sure, we have development methodologies that still support that, but really JavaScript has emerged as the predominant kind of scripting programming language for the web in particular. Our low code app builder solutions really allow almost anybody with high level JavaScript knowledge to start tinkering with or inserting customizations into the solution. It also serves as a great middleware of sorts. I have to be careful saying middleware because that means a lot of different things to a lot of different people, but it can really help orchestrate the data streams for disparate systems like ERPs, OMS, PIMs, et cetera. Finally, at the nine o’clock position, you can see at a really high level how the platform supports microservices in general. We could easily do about an hour on that alone. We’re going to do our best to kind of cover off on that later today. But in my opinion, this kind of keeps the platform agile and performant as all of our businesses continue to grow. And that’s a trend. When people typically deploy Adobe Commerce solutions or just Adobe solutions, their businesses grow. So we want to make sure that we’re building a future proof platform that grows with them and not pigeonholing them or kind of pushing them into a corner so that they have to re-innovate or reinvest in three or four years. So again, the technical portion of today’s session is going to go much, much, much deeper in these areas. But I think it’s really worthwhile to kind of explore them from a level setting knowledge standpoint and really start to think about why this is important. It’s one thing to learn app code or the app builder low code stuff and get your hands on code. It’s another thing to start thinking about how you position these things with your internal conversations. If you’re talking to prospective customers, this is great data to have. So to kind of round out this conversation, I wanted to hand select one really good use case that kind of solidifies each point, headless commerce being the first. And one really, in my opinion, a really cool kind of story here is Sunbelt Rentals. I selected this for a reason, but Sunbelt Rentals is leading player in the equipment rental market and that operates in the US, UK and Canada. They’ve got 1400 plus locations doing over $8 billion in revenue. I mean, kind of a big infrastructure, right? They provide rentals for the B2B industry. Think of construction, municipal markets and even the DIY crowd, like the do it yourself folks who have a project they want to tackle at home. They really set out to transform their digital experience, increase sales and shift more of their business to kind of that self-service type of thing, which requires less overhead. And they chose Adobe to do just that. Ultimately, they landed on a headless commerce approach, integrating with AEM for the storefront and using our commerce integration framework as that kind of commerce backbone to enable some of that rental stuff. And as a result, after they got everything implemented, they saw quite a bit of improvement in many metrics. One of them was they saw a 3x faster page load speed. That’s huge, right? That leads to money and revenue. They saw a 2x abandoned cart conversion. And that alone added something like $2.5 million of revenue to their pocketbook there. And more importantly, they saw a 6x more frequent website and mobile app updates cadence, right? And that allowed them to start getting really curated, helpful, you know, contents to the market substantially more quickly than they had done before. And honestly, guys, this is just one case study. If you go to business.adobe.com, we have a whole case study portal. And you can really learn a lot more about some of these really great brands that have launched with Adobe recently. All right, so SaaS, right? We’re going to cover this really quickly from more of a live search and a product recommendations angle. But I mean, keep in mind, Adobe Commerce now has a robust AI driven search solution. And that’s baked directly into the platform. But the key thing to take away here is remember, you are by no means required to deploy this feature for your customers or as a merchant. For example, everyone on the call likely has experience deploying a wide variety of customers, you know, customer solutions. Some of them have already made substantial investments into an alternate search solutions or solution, and they’re really not ready to migrate just yet. No problem. I mean, Adobe Commerce can easily integrate with any search provider on the market. And that leads to that, you know, services side of things, the API coverage. I mean, the backbone is there. Alternatively, some of your customers may be looking to replatform to an entirely new e-commerce system, and they need an intelligent search solution to be included out of box. They may not have a budget or the staff internally just yet to really launch a great curated search campaign. That’s no big deal at all. That’s actually great. Adobe Commerce can act as an excellent accelerator for future business growth, all within the native feature set. So in summary, I mean, Adobe Commerce really has all of these scenarios covered. And this is what we consider true flexibility. All right, let me play the video here. This is just a really quick little demo vignette, but really the same thing applies to things like product recommendations. As you can see in this video, you know, native search and recommendation features kind of come together to create an accelerated shopping experience designed to get customers where they’re going very, very quickly. Again, this is the native stuff, but if you’ve got a great relationship with many of the other search providers out there, recommendation providers, that’s really not a big deal. You can easily deprecate this feature functionality in favor of one of those. As a reminder, everybody on the call is going to receive just a care package of all kinds of additional information to learn further about this. But I wanted to highlight live search and product recommendations as a way to kind of kick off that services conversation. So now getting a little bigger picture and something that gets me really excited personally is, you know, this integrating to Adobe Experience Cloud, right? We have all these great solutions and they’re now starting to talk to each other in a very, very configuration heavy, seamless way, right? So although most of our conversation today pertains to Adobe Commerce as somewhat of a standalone solution, it’s really important to remember the extraordinary value that comes with pre-integrations to other digital experience products. And the one that I’d like to call out really that that’s just really great to learn more about is this kind of native integration that we’ve got with, you know, RTCDP, etc. So audiences are now enabled natively in the Adobe Commerce solution through the AEP connector. And this allows merchants to analyze data from a single viewpoint and create truly personalized shopping experiences from really one single platform. Now, remember, this is in the situation in which Adobe Commerce might own the experience. Really the same exact logic applies if you’re talking about Drupal, Acquia, Sitecore, Contentful, any other third party content management system. But it’s really important to know that, you know, that connection point, that handshake is there and it’s ready to be implemented by our partners. I’d love to go through this demo today, but for the sake of time, I really want to push towards more of the technical session. But I really would urge everybody to kind of either take a snapshot or a screenshot of this now. Don’t worry. I’ll pass this over to you later. But you know, if you’d really like to see it connected into in demonstration of Adobe Commerce, Adobe Analytics, Adobe Target and real time CDP, all working very seamlessly in conjunction with each other, please take a look at that QR code and check out that demo video. It’s an asset that I really have learned a lot from. And it’s really great to see it all come together. It’s one thing to talk about how these things might fit together. It’s an entirely different thing to see it in action. And again, we’ll include all this in our post workshop care package. So on time, Justin, if you want to show it, we have our other colleagues joining in four minutes. So you do have time to show it, show this short video. Yeah, unfortunately, the newest one isn’t short. It’s about 12 minutes. I wasn’t able to trim it down. So yeah, as much as I would love to show a 12 minute video on the call, it’s probably better to push that offline. But again, everybody on the call will make sure that you get access to that because it’s really worthwhile kind of seeing one single solution, you know, one single kind of experience where you can really see customers in real time fall into segments, fall out of segments, you know, get promoted to a different tier of VIP structure as a result, see new banners. I mean, that really brings everything to life. So really, really cool demo. I think it actually just got posted to Experience League yesterday, yesterday afternoon. So hot off the presses if you’re into that kind of thing. To kind of wrap up my portion of the conversation, you know, again, I wanted to be brief and really a lot of time for Surya and Nishant to walk through the technical stuff. I just really urge everyone on the call to kind of go deeper, you know, like we’ve got an unbelievable amount of just on demand training. We’ve got an incredible amount of documentation, tutorial videos, we’re going to send you a bunch of white papers to kind of kickstart your learning journey. But we really do strongly urge everybody here that’s invested into Adobe Commerce to carve time out, you know, really learn more and work with your partner teams to keep the conversation going. I got to do a shameless plug for the Partner Solutions Consulting team, but that’s really what we do. You know, we talk to our partners and we say, hey, do you have a gap in your knowledge right now? Can we help kind of frame that out for you? Hey, you got a few deals there in the pipe. How can we get you thinking as we think internally and how we might go about pitching this solution to your customers? Right. That’s really what the Partner Solutions Consulting team has done or decided to do. So anyway, I just want to say thank you very much for everybody’s time. I’m going to kick it back to you, Ed. Perfect. Thank you so much, Justin. I’m going to turn off this recording. And we’re going to.