In retail technology these days, thanks in great part to cloud technologies and a large and growing API economy, there are two opposing forces at play. One force is found in retailers’ desire to have one view of everything: of inventory, of orders, of customers… This creates a force for centralization – for “one throat to choke ” (I love the people trying to turn this into “one hand to shake “, it’s very sweet), for one source of data, one version of the truth and one platform where it lives.

The other force is found in openness. The more open systems are, the more they can share and build and innovate. The easier it is for tech companies to specialize and get really good at what they do while still being able to leverage that with things other companies have done.

It’s easy to think that the tradeoff is absolute. As soon as you move to more open systems, by definition you will lose control over some of your data and it won’t be as neat and centralized as it was before. And the more you centralize, the more you’re probably going to have to give up some functionality because you won’t have access to the wide, wonderful and innovative world of more open systems.

Magento, most especially with their M2 platform release in the last 18 months, is trying to navigate between these two forces. So far, my impression is they are managing to thread that needle very well. It’s not easy to hold to opposing forces together, but sometimes when you can manage that, the friction that comes out of it leads to innovation and more elegant solutions than otherwise.

For Magento, it appears that creative friction is centered on its community. Here are some of the things I heard at the event, whether from the customer meetings set up by Magento or from the current customers or partners standing next to me in the salad bar line at lunch:

• Universally, I heard from customers that they are getting 95% or more of their functionality as “vanilla ” or “out of the box “, primarily because of the quality and value of Magento’s community of extensions.
• I met the owner of an 8-person company out of Germany that builds one unique extension. He was quick to admit that the ride from M1 to M2 (the group-speak about the migration from Magento’s version 1 platform to version 2) was rocky. There were times when changes to API requirements were coming fast and furious, and for his company, there wasn’t a lot of business case to be had from making the extra investments. But – and this is the important part – his company never lost faith that Magento was going to be there for them too, and that ultimately the investments they were making were going to be worth it. And there he was at Imagine, sitting next to me in one of the general sessions, reaping the benefits of being the only extension in the marketplace that does what it does. He was a happy partner.
• I met a company that is in the business of building Magento extensions. Unlike the German company, where the focus was on expertise in one area expressed in a rich, deep extension, this company identifies white spaces in the Magento solution and marketplace and strategically develops extensions to fill that white space.
• From Magento itself: sessions geared toward making it easier for the community to develop extensions. There will be a lot of effort coming from Magento even around UI design so that extensions can leverage Magento’s UX investments to make their own solutions look more seamless when used alongside the Magento platform. There was also a lot of focus on making things easier for the developer community around documentation, test frameworks, and dev environments.
• Not all customers have even put a timeline on the migration from M1 to M2, but most of the issues appear to be on the customer side, not issues with the platform itself. It’s an old story: “I implemented the solution poorly, and now I’m stuck “. But every single one (of the handful) of customers I talked to who had not yet migrated said that they planned to do so – as soon as they got their ERP or core merchandising in shape so that they could fix their bad integration practices from the last implementation.

Magento’s moves toward a more cohesive platform could have easily been perceived as a threat to the developer, consulting, and integration community that has grown up around their solution. Instead, the community has become the binding agent that has held together Magento, service providers, and customers through what has undoubtedly been a big change.

It won’t be the only big change that this ecosystem will have to go through – technology changes too fast and in too many ways to have any confidence that they won’t have to face some new existential transformation in the future. But that is true of every tech company. Just in the last few years, the only technology companies that haven’t been impacted by cloud are the ones that started there natively. And we’re standing on the bleeding edge of IoT, AR an VR, and a host of other transformative technologies for the future.

At Magento Imagine, there was no glossing over the challenges – for those who have made the move from M1 to M2, whether in the solution community or as a customer, it has not been easy. No one said it was easy. But no said they were unhappy either. And for the customers facing what will effectively be a complete reimplementation in order to move to M2 – because of their own bad implementation practices in the past that have locked themselves in – I found a remarkable lack of interest in evaluating the whole market, since they have to make such a big change. Making the transition will be challenging for them, but the power of the Magento community may easily be strong enough to keep these customers when other solution providers in this situation might have lost them to competitive evaluations.

That’s an important lesson for technology companies, as cloud and open API’s exert more influence over the market. Community becomes an integral part of success for a platform, and when you have a healthy one, you can navigate big change much more easily than you might ever hope to without it. As Magento is currently demonstrating.