10 Things We Hope to Learn at Magento Imagine 2020

Magento Imagine 2020 was scheduled for an earlier date this year, March 29 – April 2nd at a new Las Vegas destination, Caesar’s Forum. The date was bumped up to align with Adobe Summit, which is taking place at the Sands Convention Center at the same time. One ticket would have gotten you into both events. According to Brittany Mosquera, Head of Event Marketing for Magento, “…the new Caesars Forum is located directly behind the Venetian and Sands, so attendees will be able to easily walk between both venues.”

By bringing together the Adobe, Magento, and Marketo communities, and allowing one pass was set to get you into all events, perhaps increasing the attendance at Magento Imagine. That is, if attendees of the other communities dediced to “event hop”, and travel the 1+ miles between the events. 

While many may have been tempted to visit both, each trade show would have been large, with a full agenda. If you’re committed to the Magento Ecosystem, you may have found it difficult to head over to the Adobe Summit, and vice versa. With entry tickets $1,695 for early birds, and other travel expenses, attendees certainly wouldn’t have been likely to hop around on a whim. They would have been focused on networking, learning, and absorbing as much as they could before heading home… even if there was a keynote at a sister event that sounded interesting…

Since the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic led to the cancellation of these events, we can hope to find out in 2021.

Putting events and travel logistics aside, Magento is positioned at several crossroads, and there are burning questions that we were very much hoping love to walk away from Imagine 2020 with answers to. We had set up a running list here, with the intent of posting information that we learned in a future post after Imagine 2020. Do you think something is missing? Reach out here.

While Imagine did not happen, we have been able to get updates to several of these questions! See below:

1) Magento 2.4: We anticipate M2.4 will make its debut somewhere around Imagine 2020. This should be a great opportunity to learn more.

2) Magento 2.5: Goals & Aspirations: With Magento 2.4 becoming available, it will be a great time to learn about Magento’s future roadmap.

3) Magento Branding: We’re currently living in a world with Adobe Commerce Cloud, Magento Open Source, Magento Commerce On-Premise, and Magento Commerce Cloud. It will be interesting to see what if any branding changes may occur.

4) Adobe / Magento Synergy: There was a lot of time spent talking about the synergy between Adobe and Magento at Imagine 2019. To many, it felt like a timeshare sales pitch that we had to sit through as part of attending last year. There’s been a lot of work done to integrate various Adobe products with Magento software in the last year. It will be interesting to see if a big portion of the upcoming roadmap will be allocated toward synergy with Adobe products again, or if there will be a greater focus on the core Magento product.

We’ll continue to watch this. In January 2020, an integration was released for Adobe stock images and Magento. In May 2020, Magento added an integration with Adobe Sensei.

5) Magento Association: This association first started registering members at Imagine 2019. It will be interesting to look back at what’s been accomplished in year 1, and what’s on the horizon. What are the benefits of the association to members, and how can members volunteer and give back?

We’ve put together a separate article with questions and updates regarding the Next Steps for the Magento Association

6) SMB: Magento has lost some alignment with the SMB market. Magento 2 is a more complex product, leading to more expensive site builds and maintenance costs. While enterprises may be able to get a lot of value out of these extra complexities, Magento has lost many small business users. This is compounded by the evolutions of SaaS solutions, which can have a lower total cost of ownership for small businesses. Will Magento make strides compete, or at least hold onto the mid-market?

7) Magento Open Source: Since Magento has acquired, the Adobe and Magento teams have talked a lot about open-source coding, and all of the community contributions to Magento’s core. On the other hand, they haven’t done a lot to address the future of Magento’s Open Source version (formerly known as Community Edition or CE). It would be great to get more clarity on the future of this version of the platform, such as if Adobe has any plans or interest in turning over this product to another party.

8) Magento PWA Studio: Progressive Web Apps show a lot of promise for Magento stores. We’re fans of just about anything that leads to faster loading speeds and better user experiences. However, when Magento’s PWA Studio first launched, it didn’t have nearly all of the building blocks needed to create a PWA experience for a Magento store. It has been evolving though, and we’ll be excited to see the latest and greatest improvements at Imagine 2020.

Magento has continues to roll out new versions and features. In January, they released PWA Studio 5.0.0, and as of May 2020, they’re up to PWA Studio 6.0.0.

9) Magento Payments: A payments product was previously announced, which would bundle Braintree and Signifyd, and be sold by the Magento team. Like Magento’s Cloud and Magento Shipping, this was not welcome news in parts of the Magento ecosystem. Magento tech partners and community members don’t want to compete with Magento head-on for customers after spending years supporting the community. Every time Magento makes a move to compete with their ecosystem, more trust is lost. We’re eager to see if Magento Payments will be moving forward, or if it will continue to be tabled.

As of May 2020, Magento Payments appears to still be tabled. In fact, Magento has deprecated Signifyd from its core.

10) Magento’s Cloud: Magento is expected to talk about their Cloud offerings on Azure in addition to AWS. They’re also expected to provide updates on their scalability and elasticity to try to compete with hosts like JetRails that can already autoscale both horizontally and vertically. These, however, are not the only areas where Magento’s Cloud can come up short. Support is, by far, the #1 area that merchants and dev teams are reporting issues to us. It will be interesting to see what Magento’s approach to this is, and if they talk about their customer’s ability to choose the best hosting providers for their needs, or if they continue a hard sales pitch for their cloud hosting as a one-size-fits-all.

Do you have more questions you’d like us to try to get answers to at Magento Imagine 2020? Let us know!

Additional Questions

As this article was originally published in December of 2019, new questions were bound to come up before Magento Imagine 2020. We’ll keep posting these questions as they arise. Here’s the first:

11) Magento’s Marketplace: At this point, it’s obvious that many thousands of Magento 1 websites will still be live after the official end of life of Magento 1 in June of 2020. How long will Magento 1 extensions remain listed in the Magento Marketplace? These listings serve not only to help merchants find new extensions but to research old extensions, including for documentation as they look for similar extensions in order to re-platform to Magento 2.

We have an update on this, and it’s not particularly helpful for M1 Merchants. On July 7, 2020, all Magento 1 extensions will be removed from the Magento Marketplace. For those remaining on M1 for a period of time after the official Magento 1 end of life, their will no longer be a place to find extensions that have undergone code review. Additionally, for those that purchased extensions through the marketplace, tracking down support for M1 extensions may become more difficult.