One of our industry’s worst-kept secrets is that Adobe first tried to buy Hybris, but lost the deal to SAP; subsequently Adobe tried to buy DemandWare and lost out against Salesforce. These integrations can span various commerce platforms, including IBM WebSphere Commerce, Salesforce Commerce Cloud/Demandware, Oracle/ATG, SAP/hybris, Magento and even custom transaction platforms. Then scientist Rachel Carson realized that it was not just killing pests, it was killing all the insects and birds that sustain the food chain, including pollinators that we rely on for our crops to grow. King, Rachel. “CEO Guide to the Virtual Workplace: Tip Sheet, Virtual Workplace Dos and Don’ts.” Bloomberg BusinessWeek. Other sources might include trusted friends who have used counseling. These snapshots will be very similar to full releases, except that they might not include all the bits included in a full release (such as packages and updated documentation). In other words, customers will not have to deal with out-stock products. You may also review the average order value of customers redeeming SMS promotions to measure campaign effectiveness. On the other hand, if Adobe makes Magento cloud-only, radically changes their pricing model, limits integrations with Adobe competitors, or doesn’t value the Open Source ethos, it could easily alienate the Magento community.
Facebook, in this case, is simply an enabling platform while the real value to the customer is being created by the app. An app built on top of Facebook can become bigger than Facebook because the customers and desires that Facebook serves are very different than customers and desires that the business that’s built on Facebook is trying to serve. But that’s not true. In the next section, we will look at healthy weights and what it takes to get there. It’s easy to believe that you will get limited by how big is the businesses on which your business is built. Not just for fun but also it will be helpful in landing up a job in top tech product-based companies (Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Uber, Snapdeal, Goldman Sachs, etc.) on higher packages. However, entrepreneurs are not hired simply to blog; they actually own the companies or organizations they’re promoting. Large platform companies like Salesforce, Oracle, SAP and Adobe are trying to own the digital customer experience market from top to bottom, which includes providing support for marketing, commerce, personalization, and data management, in addition to content and experience management and more. The relatively low adoption of such products is a powerful lesson that reminds us that different layers of the stack are relatively independent of each other and that the success of a business depends on the market and competitive scenario within a particular level of the stack.
This line of thinking jeopardizes genuine, growth-generating partnerships as you end up sending a signal in the market that you’ll compete with your own customers or partners. Most customers want an open platform that allows for open innovation and unlimited integrations. It’s all about innovation through integration, making those integrations easy, and removing friction from adopting preferred technologies. The only way to keep up with this unfettered innovation is through integrations. For example, the introduction of Magento 2 allowed the company to move to GitHub for the first time, which gave the community a better way to collaborate on code and other important issues. The Internet has revolutionized the way we communicate. Will the same happen to Magento? We also know that in early 2017, Magento raised $250 million in funding from Hillhouse Capital. While I’m not an SNL expert by any means, I do know that the show is known for that.
While Magento has historically thrived in the SMB and mid-market, the company recently started to make inroads into the enterprise. Adobe will bring a lot of operational maturity; how to sell into the enterprise, how to provide enterprise grade support, etc. Magento stands to benefit from this expertise. How Adobe will embrace Magento’s Open Source community is possibly the most intriguing part of this acquisition – at least for me. The story behind Kikkoman is one part soy sauce, one part harrowing tale of escape. A crew cab has four full-sized doors and two rows of seats; an “extended cab” has smaller seats and, often, smaller doors behind the front doors. In a headless approach, the front end and the back end are decoupled, which means the experience or presentation layer is separated from the commerce business layer. Compared to the other platform companies, Adobe was missing commerce. While that is great progress, it is small compared to Drupal. Regardless, one could argue that Adobe got a great deal, especially if it can accelerate Magento’s transformation from a licensing business into a cloud business.