A recap of Adobe Developers Live: Commerce - February 2022

[chris_hedge]

Chris Hedge – Sr. Director, Product Management

Earlier this month, we held our first Adobe Developers Live: Commerce event of the year. The event featured sessions by our product and engineering teams, with topics ranging from maintaining and upgrading the platform to exciting innovations in developer tooling, APIs, and services that enable merchants to deliver amazing shopping experiences. If you were unable to attend the event live, the content is available on-demand on Experience League. 

I had the opportunity to deliver the keynote and outline some of our key initiatives for Adobe Commerce, Magento Open Source, and our developer community.  

A highly performant, easily upgradable commerce platform 

We have heard, loud and clear, from merchants and partners on the need to reduce the cost and effort of upgrading the platform. This has been our number one priority over the last year and continuing into 2022, leading to several changes in our release strategy and tools. Most significantly, we have adopted a streamlined release approach focused on essential maintenance of the core PHP application. Our goal for the core application is to deliver a highly performant, secure, and compliant commerce solution for Adobe Commerce and Magento Open Source.

All additional capabilities from Adobe will be delivered as composable services or extensions. This approach enables merchants to have a high-quality commerce platform with low upgrade costs and ample choice to adopt the features and capabilities they need for their specific business goals or industry, faster than ever. 

Adobe Commerce on Adobe Experience Cloud  

Shopper expectations for innovative, personalized customer experiences have never been higher. To help our merchants meet these growing expectations, we have a clear vision on how our existing Adobe Commerce platform will evolve. With Adobe Commerce as the foundation, Adobe will deliver best-in-class services for merchandizing, marketing, and experience running on Adobe Experience Cloud that will augment the core commerce application that our merchants rely on today. This is not a new product; this is the evolution of Adobe Commerce.

We are well down this path with the release of Product Recommendations, Live Search, and Payment Services. Our modern services model enables us to continuously release hundreds of enhancements each quarter instantaneously to our merchants. Our customers are already seeing dramatically reduced time to realize value while delivering innovative shopping experiences. 

A new framework for extensibility 

Adobe Commerce has always been the most extensible platform in the industry. Our customers rely on our extensibility to provide some of the most demanding and innovative commerce experiences. Our current extensibility model requires modifying the core application to build custom services and integrations. While extremely powerful, this approach can add complexity and cost to the upgrade process. Adobe will introduce an additional extensibility framework using Adobe AppBuilder to create custom services, override out-of-the-box services, or integrate with 3rd party products.

Adobe AppBuilder provides customers with all the infrastructure, tooling, and security needed to build modern apps while reducing development time. In addition, by building customizations and integrations outside the core application, the cost of upgrades is dramatically reduced.

While we believe this new extensibility model will be the preferred method for developers going forward due to superior time to value and total cost of ownership, we will continue to support our current extensibility model as well. Adobe App Builder can also be utilized to extend the Magento Open Source code base with composable services from Adobe. Open source extensions can also continue to be used for both Adobe Commerce and Magento Open Source. 

An empowered community 

From a vast library of high-quality extensions for commerce to a wide variety of services for merchants, our community has helped drive innovation on the Magento Open Source code base. Our community is important and we will be providing more transparency and regular updates to the community, and as a first step we made our Magento Open Source roadmap publicly available here - https://bitly.com/magento-roadmap. We will continue to engage with the community regularly at Adobe and Meet Magento events to collaborate and exchange ideas.  

Finally, we are working with the Magento Open Source Task Force to explore a new contribution model and release strategy. Adobe will continue to provide and publish the code for Magento Open Source, which remains the foundation of Adobe Commerce. We will also continue to provide our community with additional contributions like Page Builder, now available in Magento Open Source.

And most significantly, while the specific details are still being worked out, this new model would give the community the ownership and flexibility to contribute, release and support independent distributions built on top of Magento Open Source. We will continue to work with the Magento Open Source Task Force and Magento Association on additional recommendations for collaboration and code improvements.  

As we evolve the platform to meet the needs of merchants, the future of Adobe Commerce and Magento Open Source delivers for all and solidifies our commitment to the developer community. I look forward to providing more details and updates on our progress at Adobe Summit, Developers Live, and community events through the year.