Adobe Experience Manager and Magento, the JSR

Heading into Adobe Summit, I’m excited to keep announcing how our partners are connecting Adobe Marketing Cloud to all the leading e-commerce engines. The latest addition is work done by Infield Design to bring together Adobe Experience Manager and Magento. I began collaborating with Marc Infield at an X.Commerce conference a few years ago. Infield Design has been a contributor and evangelist of the Magento platform and as my role continued to align with commerce, it seemed only obvious that we had to collaborate on bringing Adobe Experience Manager and Magento together.

Infield Design’s team quickly came up to speed on Adobe Experience Manager, appreciated its open standards based on the Apache Sling web framework, and now have many customer implementations under their belt. Over many discussions on the industry in our shared San Francisco neighborhood, I shared with Marc my goal to connect Experience Manager to all the leading e-commerce platforms. Having deep experience with Magento, Marc proposed having his team take a crack at extending Experience Manager’s eCommerce Integration Framework to connect with Magento. In a short amount of time, collaborating with our experts in Basel, Switzerland, his team has pulled together an elegant design that enables existing Magento store companies to extend their investment and take advantage of the Adobe Marketing Cloud with Adobe Experience Manager.

While at first we wondered if this was simply going to be an academic exercise or one simply for the open-source developers to enjoy, it has become clear that there are many companies out there with high growth and high traffic sites. Many of these companies are running their entire website on Magento and as the traffic rises, Magento has some challenges. This has of course been mitigated with other open-source CMS solutions out there, but all of these come with their own advantages and disadvantages. For companies that want to take advantage of the market leader in Web experience management, this project made a lot of sense.

As Marc Infield told me, “If we are looking at Magento store owners who are stepping up to Adobe Experience Manager, it is probably a successful small business that is growing into something bigger. They are successful, charismatic, have a strong image of who they are and know how to communicate to their customers. This type of company probably has a million ideas on how they want to connect with customers but are limited by the tools Magento offers.” When you look at the focus of Adobe Experience Manager from day one, it is about enabling the marketer and the business owner to bring their brand to life, drive demand for their products and extend the reach of their company. Factor in the talent that they’ll have, with a team that’s probably very technical, knows the ins and outs of Magento and contributes to the open-source community, we knew these same folks would get excited by the same open-source roots of Experience Manager.

My mission is to challenge companies to reimagine the shopping experience. Today we have the technology, the bandwidth and the digital devices that allow us to create a much more compelling experience than rows and columns of product thumbnails. As Marc says, “Are we telling the stories our customers want to hear? The experience is about the story, not the number of products a shop has in the catalog. It isn’t about being bigger faster or stronger. It is about knowing your customer, offering them relevant content at every touch-point and building a relationship. This has to be across channels and content types. Every connection we make with a customer is through content and helps form the perception of the brand. Social media, Customer service, documentation, blog, in-store, point of sale, advertising.”

If you’re heading to Adobe Summit, you’ll have to check out the session, “Managing Your Business in the Cloud: Top Five Considerations” as Ryan Bonifacino will be there from Alex and Ani, a Magento site that will shift to an experience-driven commerce approach leveraging Adobe Experience Manager. Ryan will also be on the main stage on Thursday for the Retail super-session.

So, for all of you out there that have a Magento store, and want to take advantage of a leading digital experience management platform for a next generation shopping experience, send Marc a note, and if you’re near the Bay Area, we’ll all get together and bring this to life.