Régis immediately set the tone for this interesting day, as the Adobe Commerce partners were immediately put in the spotlight: “Without the rock stars that are our partners, Adobe Commerce would never be so successful.” A thank you to Régis for comparing us to icons like Mick Jagger and Bruce Springsteen, because working at PHPro does indeed feel like a solid rock party 😉.

To better explain Adobe's strategy, a sidestep was made to Adobe Creative Cloud, the well-known suite consisting of Photoshop, Premiere Pro, Indesign, etc… This suite transformed from 'single solution boxed software' to 'multi-solution boxed software' to the 'multi-solution cloud platform' which it is today. They also have a similar strategy in mind for Adobe Commerce, so the Adobe Experience Cloud is definitely gaining in importance. That makes sense, because today omnichannel is becoming more important than ever for companies! From email, social media, community, search to the product, Adobe wants to help businesses and customers across every channel.

To achieve this strategy, Adobe is looking to change the way it works with partners by pushing even harder to work with its partners to deliver value to their customers. In addition, through the various Adobe Experience Cloud solutions, they want to give customers access to an extensible ecosystem, in which AI, machine learning and real-time data are central.

To realize this strategy, Adobe has shaped this strategy into a clear vision, namely:
Adobe Commerce, powered by Magento, enables businesses to build differentiated shopping experiences unique to their brand and supports multiple business models from D2C to B2B, all from a single scalable platform. Adobe Commerce, part of Adobe Experience Cloud, is built on a headless, cloud-native, extensible architecture and is supported by an unparalleled global ecosystem of developers, partners, and users who contribute to innovation on the platform. Adobe's AI platform, Sensei, unlocks data-driven insights in real-time to create personalized shopping experiences through creative, content and merchandising ingenuity that drives digital transformation.

To put this strategy into practice, several important architectural decisions were made. For example, the core of Adobe Commerce is being slimmed down. These disappearing services will then be converted to cloud hosted microservices in the future, making Commerce upgrades much easier in the future. To realize this, Adobe Commerce is also increasingly evolving towards a microservice approach, with headless and GraphQL APIs becoming increasingly important.

Thanks to this evolution towards a modern & flexible headless commerce system, the lead time of your innovative project is accelerated and the total cost of ownership is reduced while the business results are boosted thanks to the unique customer experience. This means that the focus within Adobe Commerce is increasing on API-first and therefore also on PWA & Headless. Thanks to the SaaS Services, such as Adobe Sensei and Product Recommendations, the platform is also becoming more extensible, easier to maintain and more performant and scalable.

The Adobe Experience Platform focuses on omni-channel personalization to not only create a 360° perspective of the customer, but also to increase value for and for the customer.

Plug&Play SaaS solutions

To provide a lighter, more stable core for Adobe Commerce, Adobe is now focusing extra on an API platform, where individual microservices can be installed to extend the platform. Customers can already use Adobe Sensei and Product Recommendations today, and as the next point on the roadmap, Adobe has a catalog SaaS system planned.

• Lighter core
  • Decoupling feature developments from the core, where the current core will mainly be made more stable
  • This also means that upgrades will become easier
• Quality Patch Tool
  • Faster delivery of non-critical updates and community contributions
• Simplified release schedule
  • Less frequent releases & better compliance with PHP releases
• Compatibility Tool for Upgrades
  • Easily identify the impact of an upgrade and localization of issues
• Marketplace expansion
  • Adobe's marketplace takes proactive steps to keep extensions up to date
• Adobe App builder
  • External out-of-the-box connectors, and third-party apps and services to build custom cloud-native apps.

Additional improvements are also on the way for Commerce Cloud customers, such as:

• Cloud Health tool
• Cloud Security
• Cloud Operations
• Improved support
• Improved performance
• Adobe Commerce Cloud “Managed Services”