Magento customers

Perhaps unsurprisingly, we expect the biggest impact of this acquisition to be on current Magento customers, in particular, the smaller to mid-size companies that make up the bulk of the roughly 200,000 sites running Magento. For when it comes to the enterprise, Adobe is not known as a bargain. This is certainly the case with Adobe’s digital experience platform, recently re-branded Adobe Experience Manager, but previously known as Adobe CQ and, prior to the acquisition by Adobe in 2010, as Day Communiqué.

According to Adobe, the average AEM deal involves upfront license costs of around half a million dollars and 3-4 times that in implementation costs, putting the initial price tag for the average AEM implementation north of $2 million. For many current Magento users, most of whom rely on open source alternatives such as Drupal, Joomla and WordPress to manage their digital content, this will seem quite high. Let us remember that Magento also has its roots in open source originally, which is where the much-touted community of 300,000 developers comes from. While Magento had already killed their open source “Community Edition” and increased license costs for Enterprise with the release of Magento 2.0, it’s a safe bet that Adobe will raise license costs further. If for no other reason than to have it “fit” into their existing enterprise pricing structure. Oh, and to recoup the money they spent to acquire the platform.

This will price many current Magento users out of the market and force them to turn to lower-cost alternatives. And Magento’s installed base was eroding already since many of the companies running Magento 1.x were experiencing sticker shock when confronted with the cost to upgrade to the 2.x, a herculean effort akin to migrating to a new platform in terms of cost, complexity, and risk.

And even those customers who have already upgraded to 2.x will likely be affected as maintenance costs increase, and the strategic focus of the company shifts, given Adobe’s reach and numerous areas of business, from content management to digital marketing, analytics to personalization.

Adobe will surely want to market their other products to current Magento users and it is easy to see how they might be tempted to reduce the investment and support for other Magento plugins and adapters to products that compete with Adobe’s in-house offering. This risk should give quite a few current Magento customers pause and have them reconsider their choice in eCommerce platform.

There are benefits to having a common, integrated platform from a single vendor, of course. But that is not really what Adobe is offering. Instead, Experience Cloud is a pieced together Franken-stack, consisting not only of components from once different companies but also built on fundamentally different technologies. AEM/CQ is built on a Java EE stack, whereas Magento’s architecture relies on the open-source LAMP (Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP) stack. Both systems are legacy solutions that predate the markets move to the cloud and neither was built as a true SaaS solution, optimized for the cloud. Both have, like all enterprise systems, their unique peculiarities as well as respective strengths and weaknesses. Both are also notorious for being difficult to implement and one need not look hard to find examples of failed projects.

Magento has had a partnership with Adobe for some time, but there are few instances of the two solutions running side-by-side in a truly integrated fashion. Adobe customers have more often opted for SAP’s hybris, a Java-based competitor to Magento, to enable transactional eCommerce. This is why Adobe had attempted to acquire hybris back in 2013 but was beaten out by SAP at the time.

Even the joint customers mentioned in Adobe’s press release don’t necessarily run both solutions on the same sites and most only have them loosely integrated with one another. I cannot name a single instance where a company has a “seamless” integration using Adobe Experience Manager to manage content and drive personalization across commerce using Magento. To be clear, I’m not saying it doesn’t exist or wouldn’t be possible; I just have never heard of it. If you know of such an implementation, please point it out to me.

There are clients running Magento for eCommerce and using Adobe’s analytics suite – which came from the acquisition of Omniture in 2009 – but even here the majority rely on competing products, most notably Google Analytics.