Magento Imagine comes but once a year, and this year we were back in Las Vegas.
While I have discovered that you can scratch the surface of many and various “shiny surfaces” in Las Vegas and find a slightly harsher reality, when you scratch the surface of Magento, you find the real heart; the community.
After a Magento Partner conference on Sunday and three days of the overall Imagine conference, I had;
- Tired legs - man those hotels are big!
- Nearly lost my voice - lots of conversations, or maybe it was singing along to the band covering Daft Punk at the Imagine party
- Learned much - there is not much difference between a shaken or stirred Negroni but there is when faced with life and death on the slopes of Denali in a wind storm (thanks Jamie Clark)
- Been inspired by awesome people - thanks Jessica Herrin; and
- Found a continued desire from the Magento community for there to be a strong, open and accessible Magento product
Magento grew as a dominating force in ecommerce due to the open source community which drove innovation, training, adoption, mentoring and promotion of the Magento codebase. It was awesome to again have it confirmed that there is a core desire in the community to maintain and grow this element of Magento.
I do wonder if the Magento Cloud product, which reduces vendor choice by pushing Enterprise customers onto a limited feature set which includes hosting and a delivery platform, is aligned with the strengths of the Magento product and community.
Thanks so much to Section customer and ecommerce guru Kate Morris who flew from Sydney to share her Adore Beauty conversion optimization story with the Magento community. Kate also shared some thoughts with the community on diversity as we work to increase people diversity in both technology and ecommerce.
Thanks also to all our partners at the Magento expo who introduced us to so many great Magento customers looking for better security and performance for their Magento applications.
I am looking forward to Imagine next year (but less so Las Vegas!) to see how the heart of Magento responds to the changes which develop throughout this year. No doubt it will be a year of testing the response of the community and the vendors to Magento’s new approach to building it’s revenue with the Magento Cloud product.
