After 3 long days at Magento Image 2018 in Las Vegas, I have a few takeaways about Magento as a company and as an eCommerce platform:
1. Vibrant community
The magento Community is incredibly vibrant. As an open-source platform, having a strong developer and partner community is incredibly important for sustained growth. Magento has done a good job of growing and encouraging the community.
2. Magento is significantly ramping up their Feature / Functionality footprint
There were a lot of announcements around new features and functionality coming in the next couple of versions of Magento. Some highlights are new CMS / Page builder functionality, performance enhancements, marketplace feeds, instant purchasing, and a lot of new technical tools.
3. Personalization
The drumbeat for personalization continues. There were a lot of vendors highlighting their Personalization capabilities. Each tool has areas of expertise and strength. Nosto and Qubit stood out as having solid, well validated solutions.
4. Cloud Cloud Cloud
Magento Cloud was discussed repeatedly by the Magento organization. Strategically it is a major initiative. This makes sense. Not only does Cloud help secure on-going revenues, but it helps ensure that sites are setup and hosted using best practices.
5. B2B is key
Magento’s foray into B2B eCommerce was well received with the launch of Magento  2.2. While it was also a bit overdue, it provides a strong feature set of B2B functionality that Shopify and Salesforce Commerce Cloud lack. At Imagine there was a lot of conversation about B2B and the opportunity for manufacturers to sell  directly to their customers using Magento as their eCommerce platform.
A final takeaway…..Jamie Foxx is super funny and a very accomplished guy. He was the Keynote speaker and he did a great job.
Magento Image is definitely on my 2019 agenda.
