Migrate from self-hosted solution to Adobe Commerce Cloud

Transcript

Hello everyone. Testing, testing should be coming through okay with audio, but please let me know if I’m not. Everyone should have access to the chat window and the Q&A window as of right now. So if the audio wasn’t great or if you got any questions before we begin, please go ahead and type that into the chat. We’ll go ahead and give it another minute or so and then I’ll go ahead and get started with the material for today. Just to make sure everyone’s in the right place today, the focus of this webinar is Adobe Commerce and specifically within Adobe Commerce talking about the differences between self-hosted solutions versus our Adobe Commerce Cloud solution. So we’ll go ahead and give it another 30 seconds or so before we go ahead and get started. All folks are still joining. Let me go ahead and share my screen. All right. I think it’s been about 30 seconds or so, so I’ll go ahead and kick things off. Thank you for anyone that’s joined. Apologies I’m not able to see the chat window or the attendee list, so if anyone has recently joined, welcome. In terms of the material for today, we’ll be going over Adobe Commerce Cloud and I would say a decent amount of depth. As a concept, we could certainly go a lot deeper and every merchant will likely have specific questions related to our cloud offering, but I think the goal for today’s session is to really just do a high level overview of what Adobe Commerce on cloud looks like and to really just give customers a frame of reference as they’re comparing that to a current self-hosted solution that they may have today. Before I dive into the actual material for those that haven’t met me before, Khalil Manns, Senior Solutions Consultant here with Adobe, been with Adobe for about seven years or so. Some of that is acquisition time, so I’ve been with Adobe since the early Magento days or rather since the Magento acquisition. I’m very well familiar with Magento Commerce, that ecosystem, and now as we call it, Adobe Commerce. Wait for the slide to transition there. There we go. And I was a little bit ahead of this slide. Again, Senior Solutions Consultant. Fun fact about me, currently raising a seven month year old or seven month old, so not able to do much in terms of activities or television, but I would say the three television shows that I’m currently watching are Bluey, which is more kid friendly, and then a few action shows that I try to make time for. So that’s currently what I’ve been up to. Again, a few housekeeping items. Before we get started, just want to make sure that everyone is aware that you’re able to use the chat functionality if you’ve got any thoughts to share. If you’ve got any questions, please use the Q&A tab just to ensure that we don’t lose sight of them. At some point I’ll exit out of this full screen and I’ll be able to take a look at the chat and Q&A, so please put any questions there and I’ll make sure to get to them the next time I take a break and certainly before the end of the presentation.

Probably don’t know how many people will use it, but if you wanted to share an emoji or reaction, you’re able to share that as well. Alright, so let’s go ahead and dive in in terms of the material for today. We’ll start off by just looking at some industry trends, some business challenges, and after that’s done we’ll be able to do an overview of Adobe Commerce Cloud. You know, what does it mean when I actually say that phrase? What are some of the key elements and core pillars of this offering? And most importantly, we’ll talk about how migrating to the cloud can mean real cost savings for your business and we’ll call out a few specific customer success stories that I’ve highlighted.

Alright, in terms of industry challenges, some things that customers and merchants have mentioned both to myself and to our sales team in the past is the fact that they may be dealing with high infrastructure costs. That can include the actual cost of managing that infrastructure as well as the day-to-day costs of any personnel that might be needed to help with that platform management or that infrastructure management. So it’s really the two types of costs there, both the actual cost in terms of resources and technical resources we can say, as well as the human resources. You know, the impact here is that with a cloud-based e-commerce solution, there’s the ability to provide operational as well as cost efficiencies to help defray some of those existing challenges that merchants might be dealing with when they have their own self-hosted solution. Another challenge that we’ve seen is simply just the lack of agility and scalability today. And what I mean by that is there may be a struggle to do timely updates, struggles with traffic, coming at unexpected or peak times, and really for a merchant if you’re not able to have what you need to counteract that, you know, you can catch yourself in a situation where, you know, site performance can suffer and as we know, customers aren’t going to wait for a site that may be down. You know, you might lose that customer forever, something like that happens. So making sure that you’ve got the infrastructure to scale to meet expected business needs as well as unexpected business needs is going to be really important. I think another element that’s highlighted there is really just making sure that you’ve got the tools to, you know, match your potential release cadence. You know, some merchants deal with a fear and perhaps fear is the best word and inability to update their site as often as they would like. You know, so having a modern type of e-commerce infrastructure that allows for more recent updates is going to be valuable.

And another thing that we’ve seen is merchants dealing with performance and reliability needs. You know, what I mean by that is really just having struggles with creating the type of digital experience that’s demanded by customers and that could be due to the fact of, you know, infrastructure hosting not being as reliable as needed. And one thing that isn’t specifically called out here but is certainly important is going to be the value add of support. And what I mean by that is, you know, you might have a number of different applications that are helping with your larger technology stack and if you don’t have the needed support when you need it, you know, that might be an added cost that can severely hurt businesses.

So as we think about those challenges, you know, let’s think about larger goals that we’ve seen in the industry. And what I mean by that is, you know, if we think about both those challenges and just what customers may want out of a modern e-commerce experience, you know, they want a platform that will allow them to go to market as quickly as possible. You know, similar to that point I made with the last slide, being able to quickly and efficiently make changes, you know, being able to have those changes highlighted as soon as possible, as soon as you’re ready to, rather. Another goal that we’ve seen in the industry is really just making sure that you can decrease risk with increased security. You know, there’s a number of different ways that risk can affect your e-commerce experience and making sure that you’ve got a modern, secure platform to help minimize those risks as much as possible is going to be something that customers and merchants strive for. The next goal, minimizing disruptions and ultimately increasing ROI. You know, that relates back to another point we saw in the previous slide about, you know, uptimes, making sure that you’ve got a reliable platform. And once you’ve got that reliable platform that you can count on once you’ve made these investments, how can we then quantify that those investments are actually going to be worth it? And lucky for us, you know, we’ll be seeing some of this in the next few slides and throughout the presentation. We’ll get an answer to that question.

All right, so that was just a brief look at the current landscape. We were able to kind of look at some high-level challenges, goals for the industry, and now let’s actually talk about Adobe Commerce Cloud. This slide’s got a few transitions. I think that should be it there.

Now, the reason I like to highlight this slide is that if a customer or merchant were to come to me and ask, you know, what are the key pieces of Adobe Commerce, I would want to show them this slide because it’s not just one thing. For the purposes of our call, you know, if we think of this as a layered cake, so to speak, you know, we’re going to be focusing on the elements that are in this bottom layer here. But I would say all of these elements in conjunction with one another make up the core of Adobe Commerce. So that’s going to include the various services that are available at the application level. If you’re an existing customer with Adobe Commerce and perhaps you’ve got a self-hosted solution, for the most part, this should all be pretty familiar to you or you should have access to this. You’re likely already using this or are familiar with the concepts. We won’t touch on these two concepts. They’re a little bit outside of the scope of this call for the most part. But, you know, as we also think about commerce, there’s the ability to connect easily to other applications within the Adobe Experience platform. So if you’re a merchant that is using other Adobe applications today or are considering that, you know, there are ways for Adobe Commerce to easily integrate with those systems. And in the same vein, on the right hand side here, we have access to App Builder, which is just our extensibility platform allows you to commerce without actually editing that core code. So again, all important concepts, all in conjunction with one another part of Adobe Commerce. But for today, we’re going to focus on some of the elements that we see at the bottom here. So that’s going to really, really briefly include infrastructure management and performance management, security call outs that we’ll make. Before I forget, and I also want to make sure I mention these, you know, you also have a platform that is both PCI compliant and HIPAA ready. I stress the phrasing of that in terms of HIPAA ready. You know, there’s no magical one button to select to make a platform, you know, completely compliant. But, you know, being HIPAA ready helps those merchants who have those types of concerns get there a lot easier. So if I were to say specifically, you know, what’s the Adobe Commerce Cloud infrastructure look like? This slide here gives us a good breakdown. I guess I’ll start at the bottom here at number one, and then we’ll work our way up. We’ll touch on it in some more detail later on, but just wanted to call out for this base level, you know, we’ve got our cloud infrastructure that includes a choice for you as a merchant of either Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure. You know, depending upon what your team is simply more familiar with and comfortable with, you’re able to make that selection for the infrastructure. There aren’t, I mean, I’m sure there might be some small nuanced differences, but as far as I’m aware of, I’ve got a slide to back this up, there really aren’t too much practical differences between them. So it’s really more of a merchant preference. The next level that we have, level two, is going to be the platform as a service. So I think the easiest way to understand that is just going to be, you know, integration environment that Adobe provides to help with developing, testing, and integrating various services. So a little bit more of a technical concept, developers would be more familiar with it. It’s probably something your average business user wouldn’t interact with too much, but we’ll take a look at that later in the presentation.

Adobe Commerce as it sits on the actual infrastructure, pre-provisioned infrastructure, is going to include all of the key elements that make up commerce.

We can think of BI and B2B that’s highlighted here as also part of the commerce offering, but I believe this is mainly referring to the PHP-based code, various database access, supported search engine technologies, and a few more items. Or number four here, we’ve got our performance monitoring tools. So the biggest call out is going to be New Relic. That’s a tool that helps you debug, monitor, and manage your applications.

A little bit more on that in the next few slides.

And also wanted to call out the fifth layer of this architecture, which is going to be the CDN, which is going to be the CDN or content delivery network. We use Fastly as our CDN. And I think a key takeaway of this entire presentation is that for a merchant, you may have a similar type of stack. Of course, you have your infrastructure choices. You might have your own selected performance monitoring tools, CDN, and so forth. One of the key takeaways though is that they may not be directly integrated in terms of, one, just the seamlessness of those particular options as a solution from a support standpoint. And what I mean by that is if you have a problem with any level of this architecture in a self-hosted scenario, you might be sort of playing a whack-a-mole in terms of trying to figure out where that issue actually lives. So you might have to deal with multiple support teams for each individual application to try and diagnose a problem.

If there’s any level of issue with this particular infrastructure with Adobe Commerce, you have one source of truth. And by that, I mean you can reach out to the Adobe support team for any level of help. But wrapping up this slide here, with that fifth level, we’ve got a number of different tools that we’ll touch on later on. The WAF or Web Application Firewall, something that helps with security, image optimization, DDoS protection. Again, we’ll touch on those in some coming slides. I wanted to make sure to call attention to this particular slide here. The reason I think this is valuable is that as we think of Adobe Commerce on cloud as a solution, merchants might have their own particular business needs. You might be a B2B style merchant, B2C, a combination or hybrid type of model, or you might have specific use cases that are simply just unique to your industry or to your business. I wanted to call out some particular benchmarks that show us that on our cloud solution, we’re able to handle a number of different varied scenarios. To be honest, I wasn’t able to find the version for this particular benchmark. I believe it’s current as of 2.4.5, which isn’t our latest version. I think that was just the last that I was able to verify these numbers. There’s also the chance that we’ve improved and probably have improved since that benchmarking test was done. But these are relatively recent numbers in terms of what our platform has been built for and benchmarked for. Just a few call outs here, looking at the total number of SKUs that our platform can handle. I’ve even heard a few anecdotes that we’ve been able to surpass that number. If you’ve got an extremely complex business, millions of products across different store views, different catalog types, and you’re worried about the larger complexity of your business, odds are we’ve seen a customer not only implement Adobe Commerce on cloud, but actually go live with a lot of those same types of complexities. A key takeaway of this entire presentation, if there’s something that’s unique to your particular use case, please reach out to our sales team to follow up. Or if you’ve got an existing account manager here, please reach out to them so that they can help coordinate next steps or help get those questions answered. If there’s something that is just going to be particular to your use case, we still want to make sure that we’re able to address it after this webinar.

All righty. In terms of what I wanted to highlight, we’ve got really like three main categories that I tried to break things down into.

We can think of this as a highlight of Adobe Commerce Cloud. It’s hard to fit in every single feature. I would say some of these broader categories still have a ton of individual features that could require a lot more conversations, but we’re limited by time here, so I tried to make sure I could fit in as much as possible. With that being said, we’ll look at infrastructure and performance management as a core pillar of Adobe Commerce Cloud. We’ll try and get a better understanding of the infrastructure and really just what that means to be that foundation. The next pillar we’ll look at is some of the security and compliance features that come along with Adobe Commerce. I would say we can also put support in that pillar as well. Just an important concept overall, but it’s not specifically listed, but I would absolutely say that getting the infrastructure as well as application support is going to be a really big benefit of Adobe Commerce on Cloud in general.

Our third pillar here, focusing on ROI and hidden value. What I mean by hidden value is, of course, that’s what could be calculated and quantified in an ROI type of situation, but there’s a lot of value in some of the other services that are a part of Adobe Commerce or that we may connect to. In terms of being on our Cloud, a Cloud license may have some innate entitlements, let’s say, to some of those services, whereas with a customer who is self-hosted or they have their own on-premise solution, there might be added costs to getting access to those same services. We’ll touch on that when we get to that part of the presentation.

All right. Again, we’ll start off with infrastructure and performance management, and we’ll just do a quick breakdown. Some of it might be a few points that we saw in those previous slides, but we’ll just look at a little bit more detail here. All right. Again, I touched on the infrastructure element when we saw that larger technology stack, that particular slide, but just wanted to reiterate again, as we think about what infrastructure means, there’s that larger choice of AWS, Amazon Web Services, or Microsoft Azure. In terms of both of them, again, they’re both going to be optimized Cloud infrastructures, not too much difference between them in terms of their architecture, performance, and scalability. So it’s really more of an internal choice based on preference for a given merchant or the part that they might be working with. I think a few other things to call out here, we’ve got Adobe Commerce on a highly secure environment. Each customer is deployed into their own isolated server environment. We’ve got that level of data isolation that customers can have. And as we think about not necessarily a security point, but also maybe tangentially a reliability point, we’ve got the four nines, 999 in terms of our SLAs across the entire stack. So as customers think about making sure that they’ve got a reliable e-commerce experience that customers can actually go to and make sure that it’s up and running when they need to access it, having that level of services is going to be important.

Now, I won’t spend too much time on this slide because it’s actually meant to represent two concepts. And I think that’s both the fact that with Adobe Commerce, we’ve got intelligent, horizontal, as well as vertical scaling. And for those that are perhaps less familiar with the infrastructure world, I think the key takeaway here is that the infrastructure that we provide is monitored on our end and has the ability to be scaled without you having to denote when that needs to happen. And so what I mean by that is we’re able to automatically respond to real time traffic spikes, things that come up unexpectedly. The example that I often give or that I’ve seen given in actual customer presentations is, what if Taylor Swift ends up tweeting about your brand or your product? What does that do to your infrastructure? So making sure that you’ve got the infrastructure to handle that unexpected type of traffic spike is really important. And without getting too in the details, again, just wanted to reiterate that the infrastructure is able to scale both horizontally and vertically. I think that’s just a key way of saying you were able to meet various needs.

And to the last point that’s shown on the slide there, that auto scaling might be something where you as a merchant, you know when those peak times might come. It’s expected or you’ve got a seasonal business. So that’s something that could also be planned around.

All right, so I’m actually going to exit out of the PowerPoint just so that we can show something within my web browser. And give me a moment here. I just wanted to check and see if we’ve got any questions or comments. Nothing as of yet. All right, let’s go ahead and make this a little larger. Normally I don’t have this window that large, but we’ll go ahead and work with it.

Now, you know the first part that I talked about, remember that was really related to the infrastructure management. One part to that that we really didn’t talk about too much is, you know, what that could look like. And I’ll caveat this particular tool by saying again, this is something that a business user probably wouldn’t interact with too much, if at all. I can’t really think of a scenario where they might, but you know what we’re looking at here on the screen is just, you know, one of the added benefits to cloud. So I wanted to make sure that we can at least call it out. So what we’re looking at here is our cloud console, which is the shortest name for it. You know, we can view the cloud console as being a really important part to making sure that you can manage your various tests that you might be running, various integrations, and really making sure that, you know, as you’re creating, and when I say you, I mean you as merchants, as you’re creating your site experience, you know, you’re able to do that using developer best practices, having that separate from your production environment, which is kind of that go live environment, you know, having those changes created separately and pushed to your master environment when needed. So this is one of the infrastructures for dealing with those types of changes. And just to give you a quick overview of this, again, I don’t want to get too in the weeds here, you know, we’re able to look at my various projects. We can just think of a project as being a collection of my various environments. So, you know, I’ve got my production environment, as well as a number of development environments that I’ve been working on.

If I click into one of them, I’m able to see what’s called the activity stream. This is just giving me, you know, high level information, you know, information about who has made changes, depending upon who I’ve given access to, to be able to edit this environment. I’m able to save my backups here. There’s a few other things that I’m able to configure at the services level. But I think the key thing I wanted to call out are these buttons in the top right corner. So that’s usually going to be important for customers who are looking to, I’m sorry, for developers who are looking to make a change in terms of branching this existing environment. So creating a separate space from a main or more primary space for which they can do development work. I’m able to also merge if I need to, to sort of pull information from a higher branch or sync information, I have all of the tools to do so. So this can get very much in the weeds in terms of some of the other functionality. Just wanted to highlight this because again, it’s something that is an ad for cloud customers that just helps with the larger development process.

And if we wanted to, we can see that this, you know, takes us to a functioning site. Just wanted to highlight that though. All right, let me go ahead and go back to my cloud presentation.

So I know that was just a brief look at some of the developer tools that are available in cloud. And as we think about this entire presentation, a good amount of the concepts and things to show aren’t going to look that different for a customer who is currently on Adobe Commerce, but has an on-prem solution. And what I mean by that is, you know, we’re talking about concepts that relate more to the infrastructure, not the application. You know, if you were to log into Adobe Commerce, that’s going to look the same regardless of where it’s actually hosted. Anyways, moving on, you know, the next topic that we have is dealing with security and compliance. So as we think about security and compliance, you know, I’ve kind of lumped this together. As I mentioned before, you know, it doesn’t fit in with security, but you know, I put support as another item that could match here just because peace of mind is a form of security, I guess we can say. But what we’ll do is we’ll take a look at FASLI, which is the included content delivery network. We’ll take a look at some security concepts and we’ll actually take a look at one of the security reports that we give access to cloud customers, which is called SWOT, which stands for Site-Wide Analysis Tool. So if we remember back to the infrastructure slide that I highlighted, you know, FASLI was, I believe, the fifth most or the fifth highest level or highest level, I should say. The reason that I think that’s just an important concept to remember is that FASLI is acting as a content delivery network. And without getting into all of the details there, the importance of a content delivery network is really that it helps with the loading of your site. You know, I guess that’s the most succinct definition that I can give. And it does that by caching some assets, whether it be images, perhaps entire pages, section of pages, so that when customers access that site, there’s a request sent to FASLI and that page is able to load some of the cached images and content a lot faster. So again, just think if you’re not familiar with that concept, a CDN helps with the overall site speed and delivering of content or cached content to your end user.

Within that, FASLI has a few other features that I’ll call out. You know, again, the cache management is there. And what I mean by that is a little bit more on the technical side, but I guess there’s more management in terms of access. You know, perhaps you want to create a site experience that only a section of your site can be accessed by customers from a certain IP address or something to that effect. So there’s just high level controls and a number of different controls that can be done within the cache management area. Image optimization, you know, I’ll touch on that really quickly as we think about that and think about that larger goal of what a content delivery network or CDN actually does. Image optimization is just another way that it’s able to help. What image optimization or IO usually means is offloading of image processing and resizing too FASLI to help your server focus on, let’s call it the core tasks, you know, processing orders and conversions and making sure that it can do all of that more efficiently.

And I think there might be, actually, I don’t think there’s another slide, but you know, while we have it up on the screen, just as we think about the web application firewall, you know, that’s a service that provides PCI compliant protection to help block against malicious traffic, traffic that isn’t supposed to be coming to your site that somehow, some way is going to impact the performance of your site. FASLI is able to help with that before those malicious attacks ever actually reach you. All right, we’ll go ahead and keep things moving here. I think we, there we go. Yeah, so again, that was just a high level overview. You know, each of those pillars of FASLI you could probably have an in-depth conversation on. And for various merchants, they might not be using every single element to that service. So just wanted to highlight some of the things that are available and, you know, please reach out to your account manager or Adobe in general if you wanted to find out more.

Now shifting gears, still within the security and compliance front, just wanted to call out our site and I’m sorry, I’m used to calling it by the acronym, but the full name is Site-wide Analysis Tool or SWOT for short. As we think about what SWOT is actually doing, just think of it as a way to see at a very high level, the overall health of your system with a number of different notifications, application monitoring, and it also really acts as a sort of aggregate of some other performance and security tools that we have. So it’s really kind of meant to be like an all-in-one type of place where you can see how your infrastructure as well as your application is performing.

And we actually have an example that I’ll pull up.

Let me just make sure we’re good on questions, comments. Yep, all good there. Let’s go ahead and pull up our example.

I’ll add some caveats here. You know, this is sample data. I’m pretty sure this is like a very old sample account, so you know in terms of the recommendations and so forth, they’re probably not going to be up to date, but I felt like there were a good amount of data points and that’s why I wanted to highlight this account. So what we’re seeing here is the Site-wide Analysis Tool. You know, at a very high level within the dashboard, I’m able to get some key recommendations ranked by priority or what Adobe thinks I should prioritize. I’m able to see high level how my patches have been affected and really just get high level information about what’s going on on my site. Also, as I said before, this acts as an aggregated dashboard, meaning there’s other services that we can connect to it. Case in point, New Relic, which is a performance monitoring tool that comes out of the box, so to speak, with Adobe Commerce Cloud. So instead of having a separate dashboard for those types of alerts, you know I can have a more centralized place for that information. And won’t go too crazy here because again, you know, you probably have to know what these alerts are referring to, but just wanted to highlight what they look like. So within our recommendations, you know we are able to rank them by type, by priority. Some of these are simply performance based. You know, some of them might be more security focused, which of course will be of a higher priority or risk level. And I think this is an extremely dated version of Adobe Commerce. I believe it’s, you know, like two, four, one or something to that effect. So, you know, that’s why there’s a lot of recommendations that are given that haven’t been followed up on. I thought this was a pretty interesting module. You know, if you’ve got any extensions that are set up within Adobe Commerce, you know, you’re able to make sure that you’re on the latest version, getting that check and, you know, following up pretty easily if you do realize that something’s out of date. So again, a lot more information that can be highlighted here within the dashboard. I think I touched on some of the key parts, but I think the key takeaway with the Site-Wide Analysis tool, you’re getting a sort of one-stop shop to help with maintaining the security of your account as well as just doing general performance monitoring.

If there are infrastructure things here that perhaps you’re not, or your team isn’t too focused on, you know, that’s fine. At least you’ve got that information in a centralized place. All right, let’s jump right back in.

So, you know, we’ve looked at at a high level, you know, some of the features that come along with Adobe Commerce on Cloud. You know, we’ve looked at the infrastructure, we’ve taken a look at some of the included tools, and again, as we have this conversation, a lot of it is going to be at the conceptual level because if you’re, as I stated before, familiar with Commerce and you’ve got a self-hosted solution, it’s really the infrastructure that’s changing, not the application. But, you know, as we think about these changes and knowing for a business user or key decision maker, you know, some of these concepts might be a little bit more abstract, it’s important to get to value.

And if we were to go from a self-hosted on-premise solution and knowing that there are a number of customers that have done something to that effect, what type of return on investment are we able to see? Is there an ROI? How’s that calculated? You know, what examples can we think of? And, you know, have we seen any positive customer success stories of customers having made that change? Short answer to all of those questions is, you know, yes, and we’ve got examples, so let’s go ahead and take a look at them.

So I wanted to highlight this as, I guess the proper term would be like a white paper, but it’s giving us a white paper conducted by the research group IDC, and it’s called the Business Value of Adobe Commerce Cloud. They were able to survey a number of commerce cloud customers, customers that previously went from a self-hosted solution to Adobe Commerce Cloud and were able to, excuse me, were able to quantify their findings. So this isn’t every single finding, you know, there were probably a dozen or so different findings and data points that were highlighted in the white paper. I just wanted to call out a few of these in particular.

So as we think about the first one, you know, a greater than two to one ROI over three years, and what’s being highlighted there is the fact that with Adobe Commerce, merchants are able to see that return on investment based on better performance, you know, a consolidation of costs. You know, we’re not just talking about like infrastructure, it’s kind of looking at everything holistically. And as I mentioned before, we’re looking at the staff efficiencies that can be gained. You know, today merchants might be dealing with an internal team that’s handling all of the platform management, you know, and we’re able to see, and I’m kind of touching on the next bullet point, but the larger point being that there’s efficiencies that can be gained with this larger move to cloud. And one of the data points that was highlighted is that, you know, the customer surveyed in this particular white paper also started to see a return on investment, you know, starting at the seventh month mark. So, you know, pretty bold that those changes are in value add or starting to show up not that long after implementation.

One of the next findings that IDC recognized was a 44% decrease in platform management costs. So that’s kind of what I was touching on previously, but that’s going to include the total of all of the various services that a self-hosted or on-premise customer merchant might be dealing with today. So if we think back to that infrastructure chart that I had, you’re not necessarily going to get rid of your CDN or get rid of the hosting entirely or, you know, get rid of performance monitoring. You may just have your own selection for those tools. And nothing wrong with that necessarily. We just noticed that, you know, the total cost of perhaps having all those disparate solutions to solve for this one problem can be alleviated by Adobe Commerce Cloud. You know, so if we think about the tracking of our infrastructure, you know, we don’t need to have a separate service for that. That’s included. Lastly here with the third pillar, one of the things that IDC found was that there’s a 29% increase in digital commerce team productivity. And to this data point, they saw that the productivity came with really just a change in, for lack of a better term, a better setup for those e-commerce teams. Having that change in the product, you know, was a huge change. And so we saw that there was a significant increase in productivity for those e-commerce teams. Having tools that had constant uptime that were easy to use and that could be extended relatively easily and could match whatever application or extension vision that e-commerce team had in mind, you know, they were able to see productivity gains by having a platform that didn’t get in their way.

Always say we can’t guarantee a return on investment, but you know, this is based on a survey of actual commerce customers. And you know, we’ve got a ton of anecdotes for various industries, verticals that can point to similar gains.

There are just a few customer points that I wanted to highlight here. First one are customer success stories, I should say. For those that aren’t familiar, you know, I wanted to highlight Alshaya Group. Alshaya is one of the world’s largest franchise operators. They operate some of the biggest brands, H&M, Bath & Body Works, American Eagle, Outfitters, and a few others. They’ve got a number of stores that they operate. And you know, this is a particular success story that has its origins within COVID times, which you know, is only a few years ago. But you know, because of large growth and having that need of expanding into multiple markets, they were really seeing some challenges with their e-commerce experience. And you know, without going into all of the minor details, you know, the big takeaway of this is that Adobe Commerce Cloud was a key part to taking their business and migrating a number of different sites onto this cloud platform. The data point that we see in the results line there, you know, 30 sites as well as two mobile apps that they were able to launch within a 12-month period, which is normally unheard of for something like that. But they were also able to see a growth in year-over-year transactions. And you know, we can think of the high-performance and cloud-based solution as being a strong part of this larger solution that they were able to craft.

Another example that I wanted to highlight here was Hanes Brands. And this is related to, I guess, one of the, I forget the proper term, one of the subsidiary brands of Hanes Brands, specifically Made in Form. And if we remember back to the beginning of this presentation, one of the things that I highlighted was the hidden cost or hidden value, I should say, of Adobe Commerce Cloud. You know, as we think of the value of adding up the integrated the value of adding up the integrated infrastructure and performance monitoring tools, security tools, and so forth, you know, there’s a value to that. But there’s also value in being able to easily connect into the larger Adobe ecosystem. And so with this particular case study, you know, I won’t go into the details of it so much, but you know, I think they are doing some cutting edge things and they’re using some of the newest Adobe Commerce technology that’s out there. Specifically, they’re utilizing edge delivery, which is a fast way of delivering content for experience-driven brands. And we’re seeing more and more, and we will see more and more throughout 2024 and beyond, an integration of Adobe Commerce with edge delivery. So they were on the forefront of trying to integrate and use edge delivery services to create their front-end experience. And in addition to that, they were able to utilize some of our composable elements to our platform. And this isn’t to say that these are not available for self-hosted customers. I don’t want to give that impression. This is something though where you may want to follow up with your account manager or specific Adobe contact, because there may be added costs to get access to some of these marquee services, such as App Builder. You know, if it’s not part of your contract today, it may be an added cost to have access to our extensibility platform.

And again, you know, nothing wrong with that per se, but for customers who are on Adobe Commerce cloud, they already have access to that built into their contracts. So, you know, it’s one less add-on, one thing to consider, especially if your team might need to further extend Adobe Commerce. And if you’re doing so, utilizing our extensibility platform will make it a lot easier to connect to back-end systems, third-party systems, or whatever you need. And also, I don’t want to speak for certain on the edge delivery service front. There may be an added cost to that as well. I would just lump that in with the App Builder point. You know, they’re still available for customers who are self-hosted. There just might be an added cost to utilizing it.

So, I wanted to make sure before we leave, you know, we’re able to wrap up this presentation. And focus on some key takeaways. As we think about Adobe Commerce cloud, you know, I don’t expect you to have every single slide memorized, but, you know, I would hope that you take away the fact that with Adobe Commerce on cloud, we’re offering a platform as a service, an integrated cloud-based solution that allows you to still have the flexibility that you have today. You know, you’ll still be able to extend the application, make changes, you know, create the customer experience that you want. That isn’t going away. What does change is the fact that you can rely on Adobe Commerce to take care of the infrastructure and performance management for you. We’re using industry standard technologies, and the value of that is that you’re able to have something that’s reliable, minimize your disruptions, and if, you know, heaven forbid something was to go wrong, you’ve got Adobe for support. You know, not reaching out to five different vendors to get help, sort of, you know, buck stops here approach with dealing with us with Adobe for both application, as well as infrastructure support. Another key takeaway is going to be security and performance. We looked at some of these security tools that Adobe Commerce on cloud offers, and I wasn’t going to bring this up because I wasn’t able to research this point fully, but, you know, that site-wide analysis tool that we highlighted, initially I thought that was available for on-premise customers, but I believe that’s something that we may have deprecated within the past few weeks or so. So if you’re looking for that level of central security, you know, you’re looking for a platform that’s going to give you a level of centralized information about just your overall site, security updates, upgrade needs, and so on, you know, you may have to rely on Adobe Commerce cloud to get that sort of tool, to get access to the site-wide analysis tool. But, you know, looking at it high level, you’re able to have native features that help keep your business safe, and really the tool helps with increasing your risk and making sure that you’ve got a natively secure platform.

The tool itself helps with ongoing monitoring, but you’ll still have fastly the content delivery network as well as New Relic to help with that from an innate feature standpoint.

And lastly, as we think about takeaways, just wanted to highlight the fact that, you know, with the new Adobe Commerce cloud, we’ve been able to quantify as well as our partners, you know, the return on investment of our application and of our solution, I should say. You know, we’re able to show that there’s tangible value to businesses who are able to see both performance and management gains with a move to a commerce cloud. And as we think about nuanced businesses, you know, maybe I’ve got a B2B business with a large number of SKUs, or you need to connect to various third-party applications. You know, all of those different use cases and anything else that I haven’t mentioned, you know, we have customer examples of merchants who are doing something like that today on Adobe Commerce cloud. So if you feel like you’ve got a particular use case that wasn’t addressed here, whether it be related to infrastructure needs, security, or just finding out more about the ROI, please reach out to your account team if you’ve got an existing relationship with us. And if this is your, you know, first time reaching out to us, that’s no problem. You know, definitely get in contact with us so that we can get you in contact with the right folks here at Adobe to talk about next steps. So I think we’ve got, you know, one more slide here just to wrap it up. As we think about how far we’ve come over the course of this webinar, you know, we looked at the need for businesses to have a global 24-7 digital e-commerce experience. And the challenges to creating that are costs, you know, lack of scalability, and really performance needs that you need to have to run that type of e-commerce business. And hopefully we’ve been able to see at a very high level how Adobe Commerce Cloud can provide a reliable, cost-effective platform for those modern digital businesses. All right, I’m going to take one quick look here to see if we’ve got any questions. I don’t think I’ve seen anything, but let me check. All right, no questions. I’ll wrap things up here. Let me make this a little bit larger. I’ll wrap things up by saying there should be a recording of this session that goes out to attendees. And once we have that link, I’m sure we can, you know, send it out to anyone else that might be interested. In terms of our next webinar, you know, I believe I’m not sure of the exact focus of this one. I’ll have to double check. But we do have that coming up on May 22nd. And I might have it. I’ll take a quick look if I don’t have it, no worries. Yeah, I thought I had the topic of that session. I actually think it’ll be just an Adobe high-level Adobe Commerce demo. So, you know, today we had a conversation that focused more on the infrastructure side. But if you’re interested in learning more about the Adobe Commerce application, some of our differentiating features, please feel free to attend our webinar that’ll be coming up on Wednesday, May 22nd at 3 p.m. Eastern Time.

All righty, I see we’ve got a few minutes left here, but I think that’s all I have in terms of content. You know, thank you so much for attending. Again, I’ll stay for the next few minutes here. If you do have any questions, something that wasn’t addressed, I’m happy to try and go over those.

All right, and not seeing anything as of yet. Again, thanks everyone for attending. Hope you enjoy the rest of your day.

Thank you.