Adobe’s $1.68 billion acquisition of Magento last summer brought with it a large channel, a huge developer ecosystem and a commitment to open source. All are embraced in the new Adobe Commerce Cloud, which is now in General Availability.

LAS VEGAS — “Last summer, we announced our acquisition of Magento, which let us close the last mile of our experience journey,” said Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen on the opening day of the Adobe Summit event here. “Magento adds to the experience vision allowing us to make every moment personal.” Accordingly, Adobe kicked off the event by announcing the general availability of the Adobe Commerce Cloud, a fully managed integration of the Magento platform, into the Adobe Experience Cloud, which includes its Advertising Cloud, Analytics Cloud, and Marketing Cloud.

“With this, Adobe now has an unmatchable solution for delivering transformational customer experience,” Narayen said.

“Content and commerce have become inextricably linked,” said Jason Woosley, Vice President, Commerce Product & Platform, Experience Business at Adobe, who had previously been Magento’s Senior Vice President of Products and Technology, during the opening keynote. “We have seen the rise of personalized products and shrinking development cycles, along with incredibly innovative subscription services.”

Magento had built up a big business through its embrace of open source, which in addition to their reseller channel, effectively gave it a further channel of approximately 300,000 developers.

“Our open platform has led the largest eCommerce community in the world to drive incredible business use cases,” Woosley said. “Our open ecosystem lets us interoperate with an amazing number of systems. It is an incredible combination of technology and people. It’s why we are so strategic to our clients. We can provide real-time insights to enable you to optimize your business and run it as a customer experience engine. It means you are able to adjust merchandising based on insights from behavior and content. You don’t have to rely on plans made months ago.”

Now a core part of Adobe Experience Cloud, Adobe Commerce Cloud, built on Magento Commerce, deeply integrates with Adobe Analytics Cloud, Adobe Marketing Cloud and Adobe Advertising Cloud.

“This gives us a more unified offering around both B2B and B2C,” Narayen said, emphasizing the Commerce Cloud’s ability to support multiple brands, sites and countries, and orchestrate highly scalable commerce across every channel.

“We have created the next great ecommerce capability,” Woosley said. “The Adobe Commerce Cloud, under the Adobe Experience Cloud, creates a comprehensive experience solution. At its core is the Magento platform, which allows you to address any use case in any industry globally and across hybrid sales models. It now uses Adobe’s Sensei AI to combine data and commerce to drive efficiencies and enhance business outcomes. This helps brands improve time to market and exceed expectations. It’s something that is only possible when you combine behavioral data with transactional data. The intersection of this information yields the most comprehensive customer profiling in the industry, for immersive personalized shopping experiences.”

That AI capability facilitates Commerce Dashboards, which monitor business health to improve marketing, merchandising, and experience delivery. Integrated Artificial Intelligence monitors business health and can predict and optimize experiences, process efficiencies, and business outcomes.

The Commerce Cloud embrace and leveraging of the secret sauces to Magento’s success will greatly expand Adobe’s channel footprint. Magento itself had thousands of channel partners, but the addition here is even broader than that.

“Magento’s whole business is open source, and they were significantly in what is essentially crowdsourced engineering,” said Amit Ahuja, Adobe’s VP of Ecosystem Development. “We have done some of that, but they do it at a level of scale that’s truly impressive.”

Ahuja said that Magento’s great strength in segments where Adobe had had a much less significant presence will significantly ramp up Adobe’s indirect presence.

“It makes it bigger by scale, and that completely different scales to a new sector,” he said. “Magento really amplifies the development piece, with the 300,000 developers who worked on their platform. That, and the open source, is something that is new for us.”

The Adobe Commerce Cloud’s embrace of this ecosystem means that existing developer extensions will work on the new platform.

“This is all part of moving from point applications around marketing to a full Experience Cloud,” Ahuja added. “The new Adobe world is changing from an application focus to platform level delivery, and eCommerce and open source are fundamental to that.”