Adobe’s Acquisition of Magento: What does this mean for agencies:
Adobe’s Acquisition of Magento
In light of the hard deadline of 25th May for GDPR, I was trying my best to keep my head down and stay focused on the compliance programme across our business and for our clients on or before 25th of May. However having confronted the same questions on a couple of occasions in the last 36 hours on the big news of Magento being acquired by Adobe, I couldn’t help but divert my attention to putting my thoughts into words.
Adobe + Magento: A Match Made in Heaven?
I can see why this acquisition is great for Adobe, a clear market leader with revenue upwards of $7.3 billion and the only leader left in Gartner Magic Quadrant without a Commerce capability.
With its best in class Adobe Experience cloud suite for enterprise content management and digital asset management solutions, Magento is the missing piece of the puzzle to address an end to end Content and Commerce market offering.
On the flip side, Magento customers need a flavour of Adobe Experience Manager to augment Magento’s CMS capabilities, they need digital asset management and finally to a lesser extent the wider suite of Adobe products.
Magento will be bundled with Adobe Experience Manager and its wider suite of products which will help elevate a Commerce proposition into big budget enterprise clients, and will get the significant backing of one the largest sales and marketing teams in the industry.
What does this mean for Agencies?
Acquisitions like this prompt more questions than provide answers especially at this early stage. Remember the deal has not even gone through. Whatever way you look at this, this acquisition is going to impact the Solution Partner community, so here are my initial thoughts.
Benefits:
Designing intuitive and user centered experiences for our customers is our bread and butter, so the prospect of having access to the Adobe product suite as part of customer offering is a win for both agencies and customers.
Our goal has always been to work with enterprise customers and having the Adobe suite in our toolkit on board will enhance the Magento value proposition and move it firmly into the enterprise deal space.
Our digital consulting team regularly encounters the ‘What about our Content site?’ question. An Adobe and Magento solution has the potential to answer so many client driven use cases for content and commerce. The focus of both teams product engineering groups should be a viable marriage of both solutions harnessing the strengths of both.
Crucial to the success of the acquisition will be alignment of both teams and a viable market prop. If a newly integrated team addressing channel, sales and marketing engages with the partner ecosystem then there will be huge opportunity for all involved.
Unanswered questions:
Will the acquisition mean a significant change in skill sets required to work with any new platform, e.g Java?
Will this impact the incredible community that has been built around Magento? Early soundings from Matt Asay, The Adobe Ecosytem guy suggest a real and positive engagement in Open Source and the wider Magento community. The value of Magento is the ecosystem, otherwise why buy it?
What will the Adobe and Magento market message be before the acquisition is finalised in August.
In Conclusion
The more I think about the acquisition the more I feel that this is a step in the right direction, however it is important that Adobe builds on the tremendous impact Magento has made in the last 4 years. I firmly believe if alignment and engagement is right with the community this acquisition will bring provide huge opportunity for the ecosystem our clients, and our future clients.We are hugely excited about the mention of B2B as the move into this space for both Magento and now Adobe is a platform for growth in a new wave of Commerce software adoption.
Finally, congratulations to the Magento leadership team, and of course the wider Magento team who have been on a phenomenal growth journey since the Ebay spinout. One key success factor will be how that team continues to have a voice in Commerce platform decision making in Magento.
