Adobe Summit has gone digital due to the coronavirus pandemic outbreak forcing everyone to follow social distancing. Adobe’s leaders have delivered their keynotes through breakout sessions. Here are the important takeaways from the keynotes of Adobe’s leaders.
What we understood from Jason Woosley’s Commerce Innovation keynote
Jason leads Magento Commerce for Adobe’s digital experience business. He says that over the past few years, commerce has taken a defining role in overall digital experiences. As COVID-19 pandemic is changing everything about life and work as we know it, he says that digital commerce is becoming the only way that businesses get done for thousands of companies around the world.
Industries were relying on in-person selling and customer interactions like restaurants, retail stores and wholesalers, to support and meet their customers. All of these companies are looking for flexible, scalable digital solutions with fast time to market.
Magento is a market-leading solution
Adobe is committed to supporting the needs of companies of all sizes, and we continue to evolve Magento to remain a market-leading solution for sophisticated growing merchants’ needs.
As part of Adobe Experience Cloud, they now have flexible options to help all brands to make every moment personal and every experience shoppable. And this is what they call “experience-driven” commerce. He added that it is Adobe’s aspirational vision of how brands increase revenue, average order value and customer lifetime value and that it’s not about something people buy but a result of bringing market-leading digital tools together.
Source: https://www.adobe.com/summit/2020/magento-imagine.html
Adobe has integrated all businesses, be it mid-market and enterprise companies, with Adobe Experience cloud products for delivering immersive shopping experiences.
The company has accelerated its investment on its roadmap for Magento clients of all sizes ranging from nimble startup or a large enterprise.
Magento 2.4 – Coming in Q3
Magento 2.4 release is coming in Q3 and has tools for creating amazing commerce experiences, headless capabilities and flexibility. The 2.4 version comes with a built-in content tool and a robust set of APIs as well to meet client’s demands when they need it.
In Magento 2.4, Adobe has made a substantial investment in developing B2B-specific capabilities within Magento Commerce based on the feedback from B2B merchants. Approval thresholds, intelligent routing, enhancing importing and exporting process and more.
Significance of PWA in 2020
Adobe provides best-in-class authoring capabilities and the most comprehensive public APIs. Two-thirds of website traffic (globally) comes from mobile devices, and so, merchants have an opportunity to drive higher conversion through the mobile.
Early adopters of Progressive web apps (PWA) have delivered outstanding mobile-first experiences with fast load times that resulted in mobile conversions improving by 50%. Adobe is strengthening its commitment to PWA in 2020; its merchants and partners unlock the potential of mobile commerce through PWAs and its incredible mobile capabilities.
The upcoming PWA studio will give the user interface developers more tools to create and deploy dynamic and high-performance user experiences rapidly. The extension marketplace team will ensure compatibility with all of these new capabilities.
Integration of Adobe Stock and Magento Media Gallery
To collaborate with Magento Community, Adobe Stock is directly integrated into Magento so that merchants can quickly discover their stock imagery to preview the images on the website and to license and integrate the stock assets easily. Magento admin tool can be used to access Adobe Stock.
Magento Product Recommendations powered by Adobe Sensei
The in-depth commerce knowledge of Magento and AI capabilities come together in the new Magento Product Recommendations feature as it is now powered by Adobe Sensei. The feature will be made available to all merchants in the coming weeks. It will be delivered as SaaS, and all administration will be seamlessly integrated into the Magento Commerce app.
Adobe Experience Cloud improvements
In 2020, the company is focused on improvements, TCO, the total time to market, performance, and reliability. This includes support from Microsoft Azure intelligent auto scaling and native reliability tools for improved infrastructure and monitoring across the board. Every cloud release will consist of security, performance and self-service tools by default.
For Magento Partners
Magento Partners interested in Adobe products can get it as a mutual offer. If they are interested in taking some of the programs that Adobe offers, the company provides more flexibility and scalability on that front as well. Adobe also provides tools and support materials for easy access to partners to get most value out of the partnership.
What we understood from Shantanu Narayen’s keynote
Digital is expanding, especially in COVID times and due to social distancing, teams are collaborating from their virtual offices; students are learning from home, and in short, digital is driving the economy. Trillions of transactions, millions of products and thousands of retailers, are in eCommerce. Holiday shopping report shows the mass movement of the digital economy driven by our purchasing power online. In coronavirus times, online grocery sales have increased by 25% in the US and 33% in the UK. There has been a sudden increase in demand for home gym equipment as well.
Adobe Experience plan can help the digital growth of eCommerce businesses for profitability. Adobe Experience platform can help online retailers to compete in the new digital era, especially in this 2020 pandemic situation. He mentioned these trends in the near future:
- “People buy experiences, not products” which means the customer experience has to be seamless across all channels and brands have to deliver exactly what they want when they need it.
- This decade will be the decade of CMO and CIO partnerships. They have to collaborate together and deliver compelling customer experiences. Adobe provides Experience Cloud from creation to acquisition, across every process of your businesses.
- Data and processes have to be in place for understanding customer needs in every phase while addressing key areas of transformation to deliver the experience they expect.
He concluded that by bringing together Platform, Products, Partners and People, Adobe is committed to your success and here to help.
What we understood from Anil Chakravarthy’s keynote
Adobe generates maximum revenue through Adobe.com and it is the highest valued software company. To know how Adobe is doing business, people need a blueprint to accomplish this business transformation and the CXM playbook is the blueprint.
Adobe CXM playbook is based on Adobe’s own experience and years of experience with various brands and the customer insights derived from the experience. The playbook addresses the fact that digital transformation is not just for business but for people, processes and creating new DNA in your company. The playbook has plans for companies who need to achieve a common goal of providing enhanced digital experiences to customers.
This playbook has an actionable plan containing a template to become an experienced business. It can be a high-level roadmap or a detailed guide as well.
Each of the six areas of the playbook has best practices, self-assessments and identify gaps in your current plan. There are also learning resources, customized guides with recommended next steps and industry benchmarks for comparing the company’s position with its competitors.
The video concluded with a session on how playbooks can help individuals. As an example, Tom Brady, the American football quarterback narrates how strategizing their weekly gameplays helped them perform better. He says that it’s about deriving the essence of what’s gonna put people in the best position to succeed.
Closing Lines
Adobe Summit has gone purely digital due to the coronavirus outbreak but the enthusiasm and roadmap for 2020 is very promising. We eagerly await for Magento 2.4 release, Adobe Sensei and all other improvements and security patches in the coming months.
