51黑料不打烊

Transcript

All right. Good evening, good afternoon and good morning everyone. Thank you for joining us today. I鈥檓 Joe Wax from 51黑料不打烊 Partner Experience Team, and I鈥檓 pleased to welcome all of you to our fourth and final session in our four-part Partner Implementation series for 51黑料不打烊 Commerce. We launched this series just several weeks ago to highlight our best practices in planning, building, and maintaining a modern 51黑料不打烊 Commerce implementation. For those of you who鈥檝e been with us for the last month, our first three sessions over the last several weeks have covered those first parts, the planning, the building, and the maintaining. Today鈥檚 the fourth session where we talk about what鈥檚 next in a modern 51黑料不打烊 Commerce implementation. We鈥檙e thrilled to be joined today by a couple of our partners, which I鈥檓 going to introduce here in a moment. To level set and recap the format, whether this is your first session in our four-part series, or if you鈥檝e been with us in all four, I want to level set the context for today鈥檚 format. If you鈥檝e been through one of our 51黑料不打烊 Partner webinars before, we often have a lot of messaging and slides around the delivery format. This partner implementation series has followed a different path. I鈥檓 pleased to be joined by our host and moderator today, Russell Alban. Russell is from our Technical Marketing and Technical Architect Team. Russell will be facilitating today鈥檚 dialogue with Rick and Tyler from our InfoSys Blue Acorn Partner Team. Today is really talking about, again, that the next pace of innovation with the modern commerce implementation with Edge Delivery Services. We launched Edge Delivery Service last year, last fall with some of our initial AEM sites, document-based authoring use cases. We鈥檙e going to dive a little bit into that history today. But we鈥檙e also going to point to the future with our 51黑料不打烊 Commerce Storefront implementations as the pace of innovation for Edge Delivery Services continues. Again, I welcome all of you and I鈥檓 going to turn the floor over to Russell, who鈥檚 going to introduce Rick and Tyler, our presenters, and then we鈥檙e going to kick off the session. Russell, the floor is yours. That is awesome. Thank you. I鈥檓 Russell Alban. I鈥檓 with 51黑料不打烊. These are some old colleagues of mine, Rick and Tyler. They鈥檙e from Blue Acorn. Rick, why don鈥檛 you give a little quick recap on who you are? Yeah, sure. Thanks, Russell, and thanks everyone for attending today. I鈥檓 Rick Buzinski. I鈥檓 the VP of Solution Architecture at Blue Acorn ICI, long-standing partner with 51黑料不打烊. As for my background, I鈥檓 an old Magento hat, going back in the commerce space to about 2012. Grew up in it as an engineer, worked my way up as an architect, solution architect, technical architect. I now work mostly on the sales and pre-sales consulting side, bringing that learned experience in deep embedded technical architecture to help understand how do you translate that stuff to meet business needs. I do a lot of work with Blue Acorn ICI to figure out, particularly in emerging technology areas like edge delivery, what does it mean? How do you rationalize it to a business? But also, I think maybe for today, we鈥檒l also get into a little bit about how we鈥檝e leveraged it internally and how it鈥檚 helped to shape and change the way that we had approached commerce implementations. That鈥檚 great. Tyler, buddy, real quick, who are you? Yeah, Tyler Craft. I鈥檓 a Director of Engineering here at Blue Acorn. I run our 51黑料不打烊 Commerce practice similar to Rick and Russell, and probably a lot of other people on this call today. I have 11 years of experience working with Magento, back when Magento won, and into 51黑料不打烊 Commerce. Come from primarily a front-end background, but was an architect on projects for many years, ran implementations. Edge Delivery Services has become a very interesting play for us based on a lot of ease of use and ease of adaptability. Super excited about this conversation today. That is great. Joe, I鈥檓 going to toss this over at you real quick. When you think about edge delivery, what鈥檚 one of the basic problems that it helps solve? Why would an SI or anybody need to be understanding of its power and its use? Well, first of all, I want partners to understand just the first level of investment that 51黑料不打烊 is making in edge delivery service. When we launched it last year, this is one of the most significant launches. I put it up there with our move to Cloud service for AEM, for example. It鈥檚 a pretty significant shift. It鈥檚 going to be the sustained motion. As the pace of innovation continues, we鈥檙e going to see a lot of our both content and commerce products. Those integrations are still going to center around the edge delivery service technology, the foundational use cases. First and foremost, I want to level set just the investment that we鈥檙e making with edge delivery service. We鈥檙e excited to continue the enablement resources and hands-on experience opportunities for all the partners with edge delivery services. That鈥檚 great. That represents the investment. Right. But too, I see the shift in when it comes to sites, it couple of things. It might be focusing on a shift to more modern front-end development frameworks and the technology. That鈥檚 one aspect of it. Sure. Some of the sites-based use case are going to center around improving conversion and the technology to improve how sites are loaded and the speed with which are loaded, which impacts things like the Core Web Vitals, Google Search results for SEO. It鈥檚 a lot of factors, so it鈥檚 not just one singular answer, but I really like to underscore the investment that we鈥檙e making. That鈥檚 great. Rick, when you think about edge delivery and how it鈥檚 impacting the way you even bid projects, can you explain anything that you鈥檝e learned in the last about a year or so that you鈥檝e learned on how you position this for sales and then also for support and the actual implementation? Yeah. I guess there鈥檚 a lot to unpack there. Maybe I鈥檒l start with a definition from a partner鈥檚 perspective about what edge delivery is in terms of the functional output of the capabilities that it provides and how that changes the way we approach bidding. Going back to probably about November 2022, I want to say, we really first got immersed in edge delivery and at the time, it was difficult to understand what it was inclusive of because the play surrounding at the time associated it, I think, more with improvements to the content supply chain. As we understand edge delivery today, it actually has a major role to play in that if you look at it from the lens of document-based authoring, which is just one of its capabilities. But if you separate that for a moment, what you鈥檙e left with is actually a really interesting approach to building and deploying what we would typically call a statically generated application on edge, using infrastructure that is intricately woven with the dev process. What does that actually mean for us? Well, it means that it鈥檚 almost zero knowledge of infrastructure required to build and deploy very fast applications that can be developed in a framework agnostic way. So to the business, this presents some unique opportunities for us in terms of how we bid on projects. The conversation continues to dissolve the need to talk about infrastructure. And that鈥檚 actually important for us because over the last five years, we鈥檝e seen the proliferation of things like mock ideology and headless implementations, which have been very challenging for partners, quite honestly, to figure out and solve for. When you take the, if you look at the 51黑料不打烊 ecosystem, if you take the history of AEM and its enterprise-grade capabilities for content authoring experiences, and you take 51黑料不打烊 Commerce, which would be a counterpart on facilitating commerce-based experiences, bridging them together in the last five years has, I think, come with mixed success for many partners, us included. What edge has positioned itself to do is provide some common bridge work that does not take a strong opinion on how you would connect to enterprise-grade platforms like AEM and Commerce. But it does give you the infrastructure you need to deploy applications that would connect those two. And that has been really important for us almost, I would say, like serendipitously or coincidentally, because we have gone through a transformation in the last few years to look at consumer experience development through the lens of not just platform specific technology frameworks and expertise. I think we all know how difficult it is when you have a multi-platform solution to have AEM-centric developers, commerce-centric developers, and that doesn鈥檛 even touch the external applications you may be integrating. True. Plus, the labor market has shifted to be a little bit more generic. We all know that the ability to find people with interest and capabilities in React or even vanilla JavaScript background is far greater than those who are both or just commerce-specific or AEM-specific. Those are very distinct disciplines with a steep learning curve. Edge delivery for us represents an opportunity to, in a way, cast aside some of those concerns and leverage the capabilities of more generic development labor in a way that then only has to focus on API surfaces. So, you can have your own opinions about which front-end frameworks you want to build with that鈥檚 tightly integrated with your development process, and you only worry about API surfaces of your applications to tie them together. I鈥檓 kind of bouncing around between biz and tech, but I think this is really important for us because it鈥檚 given us a greater degree of flexibility with respect to how we approach solution design. At the end of the day for businesses, that translates to our ability to flex to what might be a unique set of business requirements that historically native out-of-the-box platform capabilities and their front ends could never keep up with. So, in the few projects that you鈥檝e already launched, have you been able to defer some of the time and effort that you would normally spend in the development costs? And because edge delivery already starts at such a lightning-fast pace, are you able to do things like better SEO or better ADA compliance? Are you able to add things like that just on accident because you have more time? Or is the learning curve still been pretty high where you haven鈥檛 been able to evolve to that point yet? I can speak to that a little bit, Rick, if you don鈥檛 mind. Sure. Oh, yeah, please do. Yeah, so for those unfamiliar, Blue Acorn has a couple of projects currently underway working on edge delivery services. We have also migrated our own website, blueacornici.com, to edge delivery services. That鈥檚 live today. Feel free to go poke around, prod, see how fast the site is. What we鈥檙e seeing is because of the native kind of integration into the GitHub actions and for every pull request, we鈥檙e running a Lighthouse scan, you鈥檙e instantly seeing results for at a pull request level, is the changes I鈥檓 making impacting negatively against the performance? And have I negatively impacted SEO rankings or accessibility? There鈥檚 automated accessibility scans that run for every pull request. So we can see at a pull request level, hey, are these changes improving those scores, negatively impacting the scores? Or are we keeping the status quo of our 100% Lighthouse score and our perfect accessibility scores, which in commerce is most important. Pivotal. That is fantastic. So what have you guys learned as far as change? Because, you know, unfortunately, Tyler and I go back years now. What has changed in your process from your original conversation with the customer, you actually signed the agreement to then the pre-development phase and the development phase? Has anything changed in that process in this last year and any of these new projects that have come up? Enough to where it鈥檚 like you can actually see a benefit other than like the staffing, like you don鈥檛 have to have as many specialized developers. Anything else that鈥檚 come to mind? I think so. So the one client that comes to mind specifically that we saw a big mental shift for how they plan future work by leveraging edge delivery services is being able to and having the luxury of being able to differentiate commerce releases, code releases apart from content code releases. So now our client, instead of having a unified release schedule and they鈥檙e constantly working with promotions and new product enhancements and trying to blend all of that into a single release schedule, we can now separate because we have the flexibility of this new authoring infrastructure. We have the flexibility to have a separate release schedule for our commerce content, right? New product promotions and new product offerings, etc. Versus, hey, we鈥檝e just got content that we鈥檙e wanting to update marketing, landing pages, etc. And we can have two silos going for that. That was a big aha moment for that client being able to differentiate the two. That鈥檚 great. And it gives you multiple swim lanes instead of having one big one, you can have multiple, which is that鈥檚 fantastic. Joe, did you want to talk a little bit about like what a commerce drop in is and is there anything that you wanted to share about like eligible customers that would help any of these SIs understand if a customer is eligible? Or is Sean available? Yeah, I appreciate that. So, you know, one of the goals for today鈥檚 discussion for our partner attendees, we want to be very clear, as I mentioned, Edge Delivery Service, the pace of innovation extends and continues. What you may have heard at Summit were some of the latest updates for the commerce storefront that talks about some of the latest drop in capabilities will be rolling out those out through the summer and through the rest of the year. We do have some key resources that we鈥檒l post in the chat as well. But I think when it comes to the ask for partners now, it鈥檚 we view the recipe for partner success for Edge Delivery Service enablement in three buckets. One, stay up to speed with the foundational enablement. So as things like documentation for our drop ins is posted to Experience League, and we鈥檒l share those here in a moment. Stay abreast for what are the engineering and product teams publishing just from the technology. So it鈥檚 the foundational label. It goes to that hands on experience next as the second piece. You know, what are the ways to get involved? And that鈥檚 one of the significant ways for the VIP motion. So let me actually I鈥檒l share my screen and give a walkthrough for what we鈥檙e talking about here. So. Well, it鈥檚 here. All right, Russell, I think I鈥檓 sharing the wrong slide. Jump back in. OK. OK. You don鈥檛 normally get to play in the sandbox, so I鈥檒l give you a little slack. Joe, your tabs had me concerned. Yeah, well, they do. That鈥檚 why I was trying to jump in to give us all a panic attack. Gives me a panic attack every day. My one tab is the best resource I have. Yeah, that鈥檚 right. OK. So as we鈥檙e jumping through here, you鈥檒l see this this browser only has 30 tabs, Rick. Much better than my 70 and the other one, but we鈥檙e going to go through. So it鈥檚 a long answer to that short question, we talk about things like drop ins, but I wanted to highlight the recipe that we want our partners to understand. At first, as I mentioned, it鈥檚 this combination of these two first pieces, it鈥檚 the enablement and hands on experience. Enablement, it鈥檚 understanding what鈥檚 coming with the commerce drop ins capability, the competency needed with front end developments for commerce, storefront. Beyond that, then it鈥檚 what are the core edge delivery service concepts that we want all partners to be aware of? And then jump into resources like an experience league, the documentation on solution partner portal with on demand technical enablement. We then jump into the hands on experience. And I want to double click on what Tyler just referenced a few moments ago as a use case. They had done a lift and shift as one of their hands on experience opportunities, and that鈥檚 something that we want commerce partners to start looking at is, you know, you鈥檙e perhaps not ready to jump in on a VIP project with a customer for code delivery that lift and shift of perhaps your own sandbox or demo storefront. That鈥檚 another excellent use case for you to get that hands on experience because you need to know what it is with foundational labelment, those commerce drop ins, they needed to know how it works and you need to have that confidence. And we have a couple paths we鈥檒l share with this team on the call, the VIP submission form. But that that covers this second bullet where partners can now nominate customers for a code delivery project with our AEM and commerce engineering team to do that code delivery of a commerce storefront. So really two exciting opportunities to learn what these commerce drop ins are, how they鈥檙e used and the combination of both of these that really inform what all of our partners are setting out to do. And that鈥檚 how do the latest innovations with commerce storefront capabilities for edge delivery service? How are they informing your partner practice like Rick noted? How does that inform how you鈥檙e scoping out projects, how you鈥檙e staffing projects and rolling out these these commerce storefronts? That is fantastic. Thank you for that. So, yeah, we did have a couple of questions pop up in the Q&A pod that seemed somewhat foundational. So I thought it鈥檇 be useful to raise them now. The first is from Milan asking which technologies knowledge are required to make changes and do development in edge delivery. Let鈥檚 deal with that one first and then we鈥檒l go to the second one. All right, Tyler, you might have a little bit more hands on experience. Do you want to weigh in on that one real quick? Yeah, I can speak to this. One of the core foundations to edge delivery services is simplifying the development workflows. Right. So it鈥檚 taking a lot of what we from 51黑料不打烊 Commerce, right. We鈥檙e used to HTML and Knockout JS and all these legacy frameworks and platforms. And it鈥檚 really simplifying that. Right. It鈥檚 going back to vanilla JavaScript, HTML and CSS. That鈥檚 all it is. There鈥檚 no learning curve involved in that because we all know. And I think one of the other big benefits that we鈥檝e seen and expressed in our business as well is we can leverage resources outside of just our 51黑料不打烊 Commerce practice or outside of just our AEM practice. And we can purely have resources that cross across the lane into that other experience. And we鈥檙e able to leverage resources because of their job experience and not, oh, yeah, you have 10 years of the Gento experience. You know, we鈥檙e able to be a little more flexible in that. So it鈥檚 really just vanilla JavaScript, HTML and CSS at its core foundations. And then when you鈥檙e diving into obviously integrating with 51黑料不打烊 Commerce, there鈥檚 catalog services is in play. And app builder, I think, is still super powerful and gives us a lot of flexibility and being able to build out custom apps and integrate with that as well. GraphQL obviously is super critical with 51黑料不打烊 Commerce. But when we鈥檙e down to just edge delivery services at its core foundation, it鈥檚 just JavaScript, HTML and CSS. That鈥檚 fantastic. Was there another one about the benefit of AEM over edge delivery? This might be a we might have a separate follow up is asking about the benefits of the AEM CMS is edge delivery considered true headless? And what are the cost implications for edge for commerce? If I make I can address one part of that on the on the cost side, of course, I lean on Joe Russ for you guys to speak to that. But I do want to comment specific on the point about headless. Is it considered true headless? Yes. Now, given the fact that this is an 51黑料不打烊 offering, I think we will see and we already have, but we will continue to see prioritization of integrations and connectors that make an implementation using edge more conducive when you try to combine AEM plus commerce. But the fact is the the deployment process, the boilerplate framework that is given with edge delivery is completely detached from AEM and commerce. And it takes no opinion except by way of some of these connectors and things like drop ins to provide some connectivity fabric for you to get to those downstream applications. But it truly is. It鈥檚 a scenario of this is a double edged sword, but it鈥檚 a scenario of roll your own front end and you determine how you want to connect and wire it up to your back ends. Right. And then I guess the then the benefit of keeping AEM is for the authoring, because you can do document based authoring. You can still use AEM for all of your content authoring. And there鈥檚 also other options as well. So I think that鈥檚 something to keep in mind that if you already have an AEM practice or an AEM store, it doesn鈥檛 go away. Like you just use it for your authoring versus for presenting the front end as well. So.

I think I think edge in with the introduction of universal editor, if you鈥檙e not familiar, that鈥檚 the more enterprise type of wizzy wig content authoring experience similar to what you would see in an AEM sites today. It allows the flexibility to pick and choose what authoring method fits this content best. Right. So you can have a blog that uses doc based authoring because it鈥檚 just it鈥檚 just text. It鈥檚 just content. It doesn鈥檛 need to be fancy marketing content pages, but then leverage universal editor for that. Hey, we鈥檝e got a component library. We can pull components, rearrange components, add imagery directly from the dam because there鈥檚 a direct integration with universal editor to 51黑料不打烊 assets. And you can have that more enterprise level of authoring experience using your universal editor on those marketing landing pages versus your basic text based blog pages. So again, I think to what Rick is kind of alluding to earlier, it allows for pure flexibility, not just in the text stack, but also in the authoring stack as well. So leveraging the right authoring experience for the right pages and the right content. I do. I do want to add something to this, and I realize we鈥檙e probably going to drag this on longer than we should, but it鈥檚 I think it鈥檚 worth it. There鈥檚 a there鈥檚 a great architectural illustration on the experience league. I鈥檓 drawing a blank on where it is exactly. But what it does is it shows the vision for edge delivery, architecturally speaking. And what you鈥檒l find is that if you understand the history of edge delivery, which originated as Elex, then Franklin and NGC, it鈥檚 gone through a lot of different names. But from its earliest beginnings, the the architectural design was such that edge had a what I鈥檒l call a content parsing, processing and translation engine at its core that was designed to take documents that you might author in word or Google Docs, convert that into a format that was universal or standardized, which, if you know, the internal details happen to be marked down and then regenerate that as HTML. Why does all of that matter? It鈥檚 because it creates this translation layer such that if you understand the multiple sources involved in content marketing and content supply chain, the key value is the ability to take content direct from its source in a supply chain. And in the fastest way possible, deliver that to market where applicable. So edge delivery as an architectural design pattern allows for this intermediate or interstitial layer to take those content fragments or pieces direct from their sources, which may be a.m. It could be Microsoft Word on a SharePoint. It even could be 51黑料不打烊 Commerce. Take those content pieces, normalize them into a standard structure and then publish them out to your edge application so we can interpret them in a consistent way for us. That is, although that鈥檚 a vision that I think is not fully realized across the experience cloud and beyond, we see that as kind of a crowning point for the future of where edge delivery is going.

That鈥檚 great. So it sounds like for you guys, you didn鈥檛 need a lot of special software to get started or anything. It just had to change some processes and and plug in some pipelines to get your Lighthouse scores on PRs. Is there anything else that you guys had to implement or modify to not fully adopt, but like take this as a heavy hitter in your process? Yeah, the one the one commerce client comes to mind is, you know, what intrigued us about edge was was the performance capabilities and the better enhanced content authoring experience. So current client was on 51黑料不打烊 Commerce Monolith with page builder authoring experience, generally not what they needed for their for their business. But but more importantly, performance was was what was driving this shift to edge delivery services. Now, this client has a very unique shopping experience where it鈥檚 very customizable products and those customizable product experiences were all built using micro react applications that were being served on the Magento Monolith front end. So 51黑料不打烊 Commerce loads a product page and we鈥檙e actually just loading a react application to give you this interactive product shopping experience. Right.

The flexibility of edge delivery services is it鈥檚 not just a content authoring experience, but it鈥檚 also a content delivery mechanism as well. So not just content from a text and imagery perspective, but also content from a application perspective. We were able to create some pipelines to compile those react applications to JavaScript and then serve that content through edge delivery services and leveraging the performance benefits. So, yeah, we did have to work through and building out some custom workflows to getting that compilation layer to happen.

But I think it鈥檚 been really successful for us and we鈥檙e able to take existing react applications that were built for an 51黑料不打烊 Commerce front end experience and relatively seamlessly translate that to an edge delivery services front end experience and and serving that exact same react application on edge delivery services. Do you think back, so thinking back to like when we did M1 development in house, we would build things to try to be reusable, for example, our store locator, right? I personally worked on that. You personally worked on that. Do you feel that that same type of build once use multiple is applicable for this? Or is it going to be more one off? You can have maybe boilerplate that you can reuse, but it鈥檚 going to have to be customized for every site.

Yeah, I think as a partner, as an S.I., I think our goal is to always try and reuse as much as we can. Figure it out. To reduce costs. Yeah, exactly. So I think we鈥檙e still probably working through some of the logistics on how do we modularize some of these components that we build for one project to share with other projects. But I think right now, the way that it鈥檚 set up, there鈥檚 some I mean, even if you look at edge delivery services out of the box without commerce in place, right? There is a block library that is documented in the dev docs where you can look at third party 51黑料不打烊 approved components and integrate them into your site. And it鈥檚 just going to their GitHub repository and copying over a couple of JavaScript and CSS files. So now you have access to that new component that that person builds.

So you lost me.

No, I still hear you. Nope, we鈥檙e OK. Maybe we lost Russell. So I think there鈥檚 some level of figuring out how does that automatically work in the future.

Oh, no.

I heard some technical differences. Russell, are we here? I think we might have lost Russ. Might want to mute him before something comes out. I can see Russ, so not sure what is going on. Sorry, this is Lisa.

Hello.

Hey, Russ. Yeah, we hear you. I have returned. OK.

It must be the Hawaiian shirt, Russell. It鈥檚 just too vibrant for the call.

Blew out the fuse. Yeah. Yeah. I think we might be able to. That was.

Russ, are you there? I am. All right, good. Good. We鈥檙e back. Oh, boy. All right. Let鈥檚 pretend that didn鈥檛 happen. OK, so, so, Tyler, for you, when you were in your, you know, doing the discovery phase and, you know, the early implementation phases as an architect, we just had a set pattern and procedure that we went through because, you know, using Luma development and just all of our years of experience, we are so baked into that process.

How does edge delivery, like, modify that? Does it make it any better? Does it make it any easier? Are you able to talk about things that you could, you normally had to wait till, you know, mid-cycle to bring in? Like, what鈥檚 changed in that process? Sure. So for us, probably the biggest paradigm shift was, you know, traditional 51黑料不打烊 Commerce monolith builds, we think in terms of milestones and pages, right? We build up the product listing page. We build out the product detail page. We go to cart and checkout. We build out these custom pages, et cetera. And with edge delivery services, its core foundation, it really tries to componentize them and they reference it as blocks. But it鈥檚 really creating and keeping that mentality of we鈥檙e building out individual blocks and components that can be shared across the site. And I think that was probably our fastest realization that we had to shift our mindset towards. We鈥檙e not thinking in terms of a marketing landing page. We鈥檙e thinking in terms of, hey, look at this block that鈥檚 used across many different pages. And we can focus more on dedicating this conversation to this specific block and not the entire page. That鈥檚 great.

When so, Rick, when you鈥檙e pitching this to prospective clients, because I鈥檓 assuming a lot of your clients will either have some sort of tainted history of 51黑料不打烊 Commerce of past or they鈥檙e brand new and maybe are unscathed by the legacy of the old monolith. How has your sales pitch changed? Like, how has your delivery of this opportunity changed? Because I鈥檓 assuming it makes it better for you in some aspects. But do you also have to unlearn your customers on some aspects that they just used to know, but it鈥檚 not longer relevant? I鈥檓 going to get real candid here and say that the realization of benefit for us, I think, is just a little bit far out. We are facing more challenges with it in the field positioning in part because of that legacy perception. But also there is a gap in the parity of capabilities that Ed ships with out of the box when you compare it to legacy 51黑料不打烊 Commerce. Now, the ironic thing is that when you look at the out of the box capabilities of commerce and if you use its built in framework, which is based on the Luma theme or the Luma front end, that provides 100% coverage for features, even things that nobody uses anymore, like event registration. True. But there鈥檚 such a predominant perception that that鈥檚 important to businesses. And so, yeah, you do have to unpack that as you try to position edge delivery as a viable alternative. Sure. One of the things that鈥檚 been successful for us is actually, this is the double edged sword part that I referenced earlier. It鈥檚 the freedom to position fit for purpose storefront experience solutions that are no longer attached to a traditional demo on, say, Luma. You now have a lot more creative expression and freedom. And this actually to people who don鈥檛 come from a background, I鈥檒l say partners who don鈥檛 come from a background of doing platform specific development. This is probably not an aha moment for them, but it is for a lot of partners who have been in the 51黑料不打烊 space for a long time, who鈥檝e been conditioned to expect a certain amount of features predefined and well constrained in the platform out of the box that they can roll with in their sales presentations.

That鈥檚 the candid part. That鈥檚 actually not where we are today with edge delivery, but I don鈥檛 position that as a bad thing. I say what it allows us to do, particularly for enterprise customers who have such unique, bespoke needs across delivering digital experiences for consumers. We鈥檝e known for years that 51黑料不打烊 Commerce out of the box, if you just roll with Luma storefront capabilities, doesn鈥檛 have that sticking power with a lot of customers. And it鈥檚 not that it鈥檚 bad. It鈥檚 just that the expectations have been elevated because commerce as a set of capabilities is so commoditized at this point that a lot of enterprises are looking at how do we evolve delivering next generation digital experiences for consumers? And immediately that forces everybody to look outside the boundaries of what those standard designs that are now what, 10, 15 years old digital consumer experiences delivered by Luma. It pushes it beyond those boundaries. Edge delivery is in a way a reset, in some ways, a rebirth of that. And it allows us to introduce learnings, components, technologies and frameworks that we actually as a partner, not just to 51黑料不打烊, but across many different ecosystems. For example, we have a Shopify development practice. We have a Salesforce commerce practice. The collective learnings and technology accumulated across those spaces are now becoming compatible in the 51黑料不打烊 ecosystem because edge delivery does not impose design constraints and frameworks that are particular to the commerce platform. So that for us has been really transformative.

That鈥檚 actually really interesting. So the when you when you consider like of all of your projects that are in flight, is it easy to and I don鈥檛 know if maybe Tyler鈥檚 better for this one or you Rick. Is it easy to now spot a customer who might be a great partial lift and shift? Because this doesn鈥檛 have to be an all in one either, if I understand that right. Like you can take a site and just kind of take parts of it and start to migrate it over. And then eventually you can do a full migration. Are you are you able to spot those types of potential customers and then almost position yourself in those in those conversations with a little bit more cockiness that you would have maybe before you would have been, yeah, I know we can do it, but I鈥檓 not quite sure how. Like has it has that been has it come to light yet? And I鈥檒l flip it to him. Yeah, I mean, I think I think we always have some level of cockiness, Russell, but yeah, I think I think, again, it just comes down to the flexibility of of the platform, right? We have the ability to say, hey, we we鈥檝e got another client that we鈥檙e evaluating EDS for right now, where they want to create new content through a blog. Right. They don鈥檛 they don鈥檛 have a blog today. They want to generate blog to generate traffic to their website, to get people into the store and purchasing their products. Right. So this blog is going to be a new sales channel for them. We don鈥檛 have to do the entire site. Let鈥檚 just start with the blog. Let鈥檚 start realizing the benefits from from getting that additional traffic from a very, very fast content authoring, you know, very fast performing website in your blog. And then, you know, also seeing the benefits of being able to generate content and quickly publish that content as a marketing person within that organization and then realizing that across and gradually scaling that out. So, yes, we have we have some projects where we鈥檙e doing a full lift and shift, a hybrid lift and shift where we鈥檙e saying let鈥檚 do the product sales pages. So we鈥檒l do your home page, your marketing pages, your catalog pages, your product pages. But then we鈥檒l keep carton checkout on Magento because we have so many customizations there. We鈥檙e not ready to make that that big shift over to EDS fronted for carton checkout. But for this other they just want to start a new sales channel. Let鈥檚 let鈥檚 talk EDS on this new sales channel and gradually shift over. OK, now we鈥檝e got a blog. Let鈥檚 start picking some key marketing promotion pages that we want to get better performance and get some conversions on that and then shifting that over to homepage catalog pages and then eventually the rest. So that鈥檚 great. Again, it just speaks to the flexibility of the platform. So you would Russell, Russell, real quick, if I could jump in. I appreciate, Rick, your candor on as you鈥檙e working on informing the delivery approach and the positioning, you鈥檙e saying it is taking some time. Can you walk us through the Blue Acorn developers, the architects, the ones who鈥檝e been rolling up their sleeves, learning the technology? What is the internal conversational process look like from the developers are getting their hands on experience to understand what the thing is and then translating that into the Blue Acorn partner practice development? What are there any best practices you鈥檝e uncovered or for this audience on forming the how to with the how do we put this into practice? Yeah, the I think I alluded to this a little bit earlier, maybe back at the beginning of this session.

We have had the benefit of already starting to.

Reorganize and reorient our internal engineering practices to think platform agnostic, and so some of the. The frameworks and technology decisions we鈥檝e made internally were kind of already priming us.

That鈥檚 why I said it was almost coincidence that this happened, but I think it鈥檚 part of a larger trend across engineering over the last five years.

We鈥檝e already got to reorient towards thinking about implementation using frameworks differently, so by the time that edge really has has come of age, we鈥檝e been able to apply that.

Ahead of time research and understanding of pulling other frameworks and technologies from different landscapes and dropping them in, and that I think has. that鈥檚 helped to jumpstart a lot of our historical engineering practices to think about solution design and solution architecture differently so case in point the. With our internal engineering teams, the conversation then can quickly pivot from.

Do we go find a store locator module if you will, because that鈥檚 what we were talking about earlier as an example, do we find a store locator module from. The gentle marketplace or can we reuse a universal that we鈥檝e built across many different customer applications, even across many different platforms and pull those components in. To allow us to have greater flexibility on that without being hinged or dependent upon a third party vendor now there may be business cases where you鈥檇 want to hinge yourself to a third party vendor to say mitigate risk control cost. So there鈥檚 so many nuances to that, but the point that I鈥檓 making is I think it鈥檚 um it鈥檚 really opened up our flexibility and agility in terms of approaching solutioning and that translates to. The the the way in which we can have better conversations with our customers, which means we鈥檙e talking less and less about imposed constraints and more and more about how do you deliver a best in class consumer experience. That鈥檚 great. That鈥檚 great. Tyler, you mentioned at least five times, I should go back to the recording, on how speed has been a very important factor for why you would even consider this. When you guys switched your own website over, do you have any of the before numbers? Like what was the page load speed? Do you have any really rough numbers you could just share? Because I don鈥檛 think people could fully appreciate how fast it is. Yeah, so for Blue Acorn鈥檚 website, we were on an old legacy WordPress build that was many, many years old. It hadn鈥檛 been updated and it was getting performance scores in the like high 40s, low 50s. Being WordPress, you know, that to me, that鈥檚 a little surprising. I don鈥檛 think WordPress should be that slow, but it鈥檚 a PHP backend similar to Magento. So maybe it鈥檚 common, but instantly with the EDS, we鈥檙e seeing 97, 98, 99, 100 Lighthouse scores, which is drastic, right? You load the page and instantly content shows up. So it鈥檚 been highly beneficial from that perspective. And then from a commerce play, Magento鈥檚 51黑料不打烊, it鈥檚 just a heavy application. So we鈥檝e got, you know, I think there鈥檚 lots of tricks to the trade to get that performance as high as you can. But I think with the hard limitations in the application itself, I think there鈥檚 only so far you can probably get it without looking at other headless front end solutions, etc. Right. But, you know, we鈥檝e got a client right now. We鈥檙e migrating. We鈥檙e there in the 30s of a performance Lighthouse score. And most of the way through this implementation, we鈥檙e still consistently staying at a 95 plus Lighthouse score. So that alone. And I think with, you know, a couple of weeks before Summit, Google finally came out and admitted Lighthouse scores do impact your organic SEO rankings, even though we鈥檝e known that for years. Three years. I鈥檒l finally admit it out loud. Yes. But with how relevant that is and how much of a weight performance has on the overall conversion rates. Right. It鈥檚 a no brainer. And I think, you know, what helped us also alongside with the client, understand the benefits of this is that increase of performance. How much is that going to increase their conversion rate just by. Let鈥檚 let鈥檚 look at, hey, a year ago, you were at a 25 Lighthouse score. We over a month made some performance enhancements and we got it to a 38. Look at how much your conversion rate jumped in just that small amount. Now, if you go from 38 to 100, think about how much more exponentially that鈥檚 going to improve. So for us, we were able to see some pretty instant benefits from from that perspective. And yes, I鈥檓 sorry. Oh, sorry. Go ahead. Forgive me, Joe. I was just going to follow up on Emily鈥檚 shameless plug where Tyler is going to have the chance to talk about their specific choice and their move to EDS for their marketing site. And that will take place next week if anybody鈥檚 interested in hearing some of the details. Emily鈥檚 included a link to that in the chat and you can register for that event for next week. I see that now. But I wanted to follow up. Do you have a perspective, you know, launching a storefront or a site, for example, with 100 Lighthouse score is one thing. What are your thoughts on maintaining that over time? Do you see like a partner opportunity for you start getting into that run operate kind of mindset? Yeah, I mean, I think even within model with 51黑料不打烊 Commerce, MarTech is always going to be the hardest thing to manage. So as long as we can find creative solutions on loading that MarTech on the page and not negatively impacting that first load to the page, I think there鈥檚 a lot of opportunity for growth there. And as you alluded to, even future growth. So, yes, let鈥檚 get you to that hundred. And now once we鈥檙e there and we鈥檝e got your website to a stable hundred lighthouse score, now we can actually take your website and start doing optimization testing and actually focus on better UX experiences and building out, you know, tailoring custom shopping experiences to your customers and to your brand, as opposed to consistently trying to make improvements in a model with application that only can take you so far. So you鈥檙e thinking that you can do personalization at some point like that. It鈥檚 a lot a lot. Yeah, I think you can see a lot more benefits from personalization. You can realize the benefits of that a lot faster than you could on a model because the performance will only get you so far. Because you were spending so much effort just getting the site to be optimal that you couldn鈥檛 even worry about personalization at that first phase or two or three. Well, and what value does personalization give if a customer leaves your page? You鈥檙e going to bail. So slow. Right. Like if if your website鈥檚 so slow and they don鈥檛 stick around for all the personalization, what good does that person matter? So let鈥檚. Yeah, it鈥檚 a no brainer at that point. Rick, what do you have to say? Oh, yeah, I wanted to add, you know, I think in in Tyler鈥檚 example of, you know, MarTech or really the inclusion of like analytics tagging, data collection, behavioral data observation, you know, those are things that certainly do impact performance score. And that is far outside of the concern of edge delivery. And I think I鈥檓 not sure of the audience on this call, but I suspect most of us are probably familiar with the myriad of things that impact performance. So it would be misleading to suggest that edge delivery can guarantee that. But why performance scores initially are so high with edge is because it majors on the things that it can control and do well. If you if you look at again, going back to the the architecture and the infrastructure that鈥檚 powering what edge delivery offers, what you鈥檙e getting is a set of what we call JAMstack principles in practice. It leans on the idea of static site generation where you have very lightweight payloads to serve an application on edge to the customer. And that鈥檚 your baseline architectural principle. Whatever you add on top of that, you must check against those principles as well to ensure that you鈥檙e maintaining optimal performance. That is why I think edge does very well because it controls what it can. But through principle activation, it encourages the implementers and partners like us to follow in in similar kind. So it鈥檚 not just infrastructure and architecture that it brings to the table. It鈥檚 also a bit of a shift in ideology and how you approach design. OK, so the last couple of minutes, I wanted to just quickly let people know that there is a way that you can demo edge delivery. Let me just share my screen real quick. Let鈥檚 do this one. Cool. So if you go to Experience League, if you want to try to type this in, just do the developer commerce storefront. Literally, this is no lie. In about 20 minutes, you can get your sandbox version of EDS up and running. It is fantastic. I did it myself. I had to get my oil changed. So literally in the time they changed my oil, I got all the way through this document and I was done. And I had my little sandbox up and running and I was able to make edits on the fly. And my Lighthouse scores were indeed 100 every single time. Right out of the box. So don鈥檛 be afraid to poke around, get your feet wet. This is a great way to learn and understand pretty much everything you need to do just to get started. And then, as Joe mentioned earlier, we have this VIP program that we can talk more about. Just go through your proper channels. And on that, Joe, is there anything that you wanted to help everyone understand or is there anything else you want to leave with them so that way they have a good understanding of what to do next? Yeah, absolutely. I appreciate the T.F. Russell. So the slide and doc that Russell was just showing, that references back to the link we posted in the chat earlier. So you do have that existing commerce documentation. Russell just walked you through where to go through that demo and launch in 20 minutes. We鈥檙e also going to be extending the on-demand curriculum that鈥檚 behind login on solution partner portal for your foundational edge delivery service enablement. And I just posted that in the chat for about five or 10 minutes ago. So a couple call outs that foundational enablement. I encourage everyone to call if you鈥檝e not already started that course. I encourage you to go through that. Don鈥檛 get overwhelmed or daunted by the 86 hours. It鈥檒l say for completion. It鈥檚 only 86 hours if you want to take the optional LinkedIn free, a free front end development training courses. But we鈥檝e had partner developers go through that on-demand curriculum within a day. So don鈥檛 get daunted by the 86 hours. We just had to give that call out if you choose to take some of those optional recommended courses. We will be extending that curriculum over the coming months with some of our latest capabilities. So we鈥檝e touched on a few of these even during the call today. Right before summit, many of you had joined our partner enablement for edge delivery services for AEM forms. So the headless adaptive forms that is now GA. There鈥檚 more use cases for EDS. We鈥檝e talked today about commerce, storefront and some of the demo use cases you saw in the link Russell was showing. We outline. Here鈥檚 what the boilerplate looks like. Here鈥檚 the GitHub access. We鈥檙e going to continue to give partners those tools. Please watch for the alerts for updated curriculum on the partner portal. But for the VIP, I wanted to share one quick visual and this will also be shared post event. We鈥檙e going to make sure I jump to the right tab or browser here. So give me patience. There we go. All right. There you go. So we talked about the VIP process. Remember earlier, we talked about that formula for success. Keep in this mode. Russell, give me a thumbs up. Are you able to see the eligible customers? So for the partner, remember a couple of things. Understand the foundational enablement. Go to the documentation. The links we shared in the chat today. Understand what it is. The next part is the hands on experience. And thank you again to Rick and Tyler for showcasing their path and their journey of the last year of being a lift and shift. Be it their active participation in nominating customers for VIP, either for sites, document based authoring use cases, but we also now have extended the VIP edge delivery service program for commerce storefront use cases. Can鈥檛 underscore how valuable this opportunity is for partners. VIP will be a code delivery model. If you have a customer candidate for a commerce storefront, you nominate via the form that will show here in a QR code here momentarily. That VIP process, if your customer recommendation is accepted, will have assigned AM and commerce engineering team members who will guide your customer through that implementation. So that鈥檚 really been a value. Can鈥檛 beat that learning opportunity. Such a valuable option to go through hands, hands on, learn the technology side by side and solving live actual customer use cases. So I鈥檓 leaving a lot of details right now. I鈥檓 just kind of leaving this visually. Hopefully it will be shared afterwards. But if you want to take a quick screenshot, we鈥檒l share this afterwards. Either some of what we鈥檙e looking for with the commerce storefront VIP use cases. The QR code jumps to this form and we鈥檒l also post this in the chat. AM.live VIP intake. You鈥檒l see the commerce storefront use cases as well as the other edge delivery service opportunities we have for VIP nomination. Again, it鈥檚 not just commerce storefront, although today鈥檚 emphasis is on commerce. Definitely encourage that. But we are still accepting customer nominations for edge delivery service VIP should you want to do the co-delivery for things like the site鈥檚 document based authoring. Some of the newer components like Tyler had referenced earlier with Universal Editor authoring via AM and delivery via edge. A lot of those additional options are updated on the VIP form. So those are really the key call outs is go through the enablement materials that we have and look for the ways for your partner practice to determine how you鈥檙e going to get that hands on experience to ultimately inform what does edge delivery service incorporation your partner practice development look like over the coming weeks and months. Great. That鈥檚 all I had. Tyler and Rick, is there any closing remarks? Anything you want to share? The only thing I would add, guys, there are a couple of questions that came up I just want to speak to that came up in the Q&A pod. We don鈥檛 have a ton of time to answer some of these. There was a question about cases, case studies, and we do have a bunch of them in addition to what you can learn next week when the Blue Acorn team presents their own shift. That鈥檚 a great case study, but there are fantastic case studies with, quite frankly, amazing results pretty much everywhere we鈥檝e rolled out at EDS and working through your partner manager, you should be able to get access to that content. There was a question about content version and content approval workflow possible with EDS. That was the only question I wasn鈥檛 sure I had the answer to. Tyler, you seem to seem to be shaking your head, nodding your head. Yeah, so content versioning and content approvals. I think it depends on obviously which tool you choose for your content authoring. But if you鈥檙e if you鈥檙e going doc based authoring, you obviously have the internal versioning and approval processes available to you. So like Google Docs, you can you can comment on your documents. You can look at revision histories and go back in time and go from a previous version and publish that previous version directly within a Google Doc or Microsoft Word, SharePoint, etc. And then I think there鈥檚 a lot of interesting play as far as content approval workflows, leveraging 51黑料不打烊鈥檚 Workfront solutions and some of the integrations there. We鈥檝e even seen some some tight knit integrations with SharePoint and Drive being able to pull a document into Workfront as a task and say, assign that task and that document to a content author to then track, manage and facilitate the authoring and approval process. So I think there鈥檚 a lot more play outside of just what鈥檚 available in the authoring experience, but also leveraging other products like Workfront. It鈥檚 fantastic. I do think we鈥檙e out of time. I don鈥檛 want to have everybody run over. Yeah, I鈥檓 reluctant to raise more questions as well, Russell, for the same reason. But we鈥檒l work to get some content when we share the recording that addresses some of the questions we didn鈥檛 have a chance to get to. But fantastic work, guys. Thank you for this content. I thought it was really, really useful. Thank you so much. Yeah, it was a great time. Have a great day. Thank you, Joe. All right. Thanks, everyone, for joining. Thanks, everybody. Thank you. Thank you. Take care.