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Leading the Charge at Imagine 2018

April 26, 2018

By: Magento Marketing Team
Tags:
#RoadToImagine
Imagine
  • CEO Mark Lavelle at Imagine 2018
    Mark addresses the General Session crowd on Monday evening.
  • Master of Ceremonies, Phillip Jackson
    Phillip shares a laugh with the crowd.
  • Jamie Foxx and Mark Lavelle
    Jamie Foxx shares a moment on stage with CEO Mark Lavelle
  • Big Dam Run
    The amazing Big Dam Runners
  • Analyst Sucharita Kodali from Forrester
    Sucharita shares insights on the commerce industry
  • The Community Mural
    Magento Creative Director Claudia Penwell adds her mark to the Community Mural.
  • Keynote Speaker and Futurist, Jason Silva
    Jason on stage during Tuesday morning's keynote presentation/
  • Lou Pietragallo Jr. and Gina Faiola
    Lou and Gina shares the Pittsburgh Steelers' commerce journey.
  • The Magento Masters
    The Magento Masters take a group shot on stage with Mark Lavelle
  • Magento Podcast
    The Magento Podcast Booth in full effect.

The eighth Magento Imagine event came to a close in Las Vegas Wednesday afternoon after three days of informative breakout sessions, inspiring keynote presentations, and engaging networking opportunities. Thank you for joining us and making 2018 a special experience. This year’s conference saw record attendance, bringing over 3000+ attendees, across 60+ countries together to Lead the Charge.

Magento Commerce CEO, Mark Lavelle, kicked off Monday night’s General Session presentation by sharing what Lead the Charge means to him. Mark shared: when we think of leaders, we often think of certain individuals who have an outsized impact on society, but now, that has changed. “Today,” he said, “technology and globalization give rise to leadership opportunities for everyone.” 

“It takes people with different styles and skills to make change happen, and when leaders come together in a community... they have a powerful impact,” said Mark Lavelle.

At Imagine 2018, Mark emphasized that Magento is leading the charge by continuing to invest and support an open and collaborative community. This is germane to our company vision of “a world of commerce without limits. A world where technology is open to everyone, available everywhere, and powered by human ingenuity.” 

In addition, Master of Ceremonies, Phillip Jackson, shared a heartfelt story about leading the charge in his own life and how the Magento community sustained him through his professional growth and personal weight-loss journey. 

Finding Commerce Success through Leadership

Imagine 2018 featured a number of merchant keynote and breakout speakers who shared their insights and best practices for leading the charge in commerce.

On Monday, we celebrated World Book Day with Magento Commerce customer, First Book. Learn how First Book is transforming the lives of children. Read more.

Peter Sinclair, the Senior Vice President, Consumer of Universal Music Group shared his vision for driving deeper engagement between artists and their fans through digital.

Louis Pietragallo Jr., Director of Digital, and Gina Faiola, Digital Merchandiser & Marketer, at the Pittsburgh Steelers shared how personalization is redefining engagement with fans, both online and offline. (Follow them @SteelersShop)

Melissa Ben-Ishay, the President & Chief Product Officer at Baked by Melissa, shared an inspiring story on overcoming challenges and seizing new opportunities. Read the full blog on her presentation.

On Wednesday, Alex Melvin, President & CEO of Rural King, explored how the farm supply company is delivering on their customer service ethos with omnichannel commerce. Read the full story.

Golden Tips from Industry Insiders

Imagine 2018 also featured technology and commerce industry insiders who shared their perspectives on the future of commerce.

Sucharita Kodali, VP of Principal Analyst Serving eBusiness & Channel Strategy Professionals at Forrester, discussed the myth of the “Retail Apocalypse” and how merchants can drive sustained growth by slaying the orthodoxies of retail. 

Bill Scott, VP, PayPal Consumer & Venmo Engineering, shared the opportunities that retailers have to create differentiated experiences and lead by looking at money in a different way.

Jason Silva, Futurist and Host of Brain Games, challenged us to rethink opportunities in changing times.

Eric Broussard, VP of International Marketplaces and Retail at Amazon, shared how brands and retailers can tap Amazon infrastructure and innovations to fuel business growth.

Keynote Speaker Jamie Foxx Was Electric on Stage

Jamie Foxx joined Mark for a candid discussion, in which he shared highlights from his remarkable life, and revealed how he juggles the many facets of his phenomenal career. Read more.

We Celebrated Magento Customers and Community Members

There was a lot to celebrate at Imagine 2018. 

Magento Masters

We honored the incredible contributions of the 2018 Magento Masters, the most active members of the Magento community.

The Imagine Excellence Award Winners

A record number of 250 submissions resulted in 16 award recipients, including individuals, companies, and brands who were chosen for their outstanding achievements in commerce. Learn more about the winners. 

Magento Trailblazer Awards

We announced two Trailblazer Award winners. This award recognizes executives who have a vision and find a way, no matter what the challenge or obstacles, to reach the top of the mountain. These leaders bring others along with them and form solid teams.

B2C Award – Director of Digital Innovation at Devlyn, Andrew Devlyn

In this 80-year-old business, Andrew used digital commerce to unify physical inventory across 1,200 stores so that the best styles were always in stock and a sale was never lost. Read the case study.

B2B Award – Eric Zillmer, eBusiness Platform Manager, Steelcase

Eric led the digital journey at a century-old office furniture company. He’s tackled incredibly complex processes and custom system integrations, and a massive product catalog, bringing cutting-edge functionality to their extensive dealer network and corporate clients. Read the case study.

Community Engagement

Imagine is always a great opportunity for the Magento Developer community to come together to share and collaborate, and this year was no exception. We hosted the Magento Hackathon on Saturday and Sunday, as well as, DevExchange on Wednesday afternoon. This year at the Magento Hackathon, we saw members from Outreach, DevDocs, Community Engineering, MTAF, and Core engineering take part, with several contributions to the core and MSI project.

DexEchange was packed on Wednesday! The session was very active this year, with PWA being a particularly hot topic of conversation.

Magento boasts the most global and active community in all of commerce: Community engagement on Magento Forums has grown 45 percent – with 315,000+ members. The Community Engineering initiative has also had a significant impact on the volume and velocity of Community-led improvements and enhancements being incorporated into Magento code. Now over 24 percent of new Magento code is contributed by the community, making Magento the top contributed PHP platform.

We could not have reached this level of success without participation from key community contributors. Thank you to the Top 5 Core Contributors of 2017:

  • Lewis Voncken

  • Danny Verkade

  • Adrián Martinez Guantes

  • Rahkesh Jesadiya

  • Oscar Recio

New Community Initiatives 

Magento CMO, Andrea Ward, emphasized that the Magento community is at the heart of change for our business. Tackling challenges together and sharing our experiences is what connects us. This community of innovators is such a critical part of our shared success, as developers, as merchants, and as partners.

To continue this collaboration, we announced two new community initiatives: The Magento Association and the Community Insider Program. Learn more about them here. 

The Magento Association would love to hear how you’d like to collaborate. Submit your feedback in this short survey. 

The Magento Roadmap

In the final Wednesday morning General Session, Jason Woosley, SVP of Product & Technology at Magento, shared the latest updates to the Magento roadmap. Magento is expanding its solution set in terms of what we offer for B2B, B2C, and omnichannel and how we offer it – with public cloud delivery models.

“We’ve innovated more rapidly than anyone else, covering insane use cases that simply cannot be serviced by other platforms.”

As a company, we strive to marry the ecosystem and platform to deliver against dynamic retail challenges. And our latest roadmap updates reflect that.

We announced DHL as a new Premier Partner and will be integrated with Magento Shipping to enable merchants to offer more shipping options. Read the Press Release.

We announced the latest version of Magento Commerce which features integrations with Amazon Pay, Klarna, and Vertex to expedite the checkout process, provide flexible payment terms, and deliver instant and accurate tax and shipping rates. Read the Press Release. 

With the announcement of PWA Studio, Magento is leading the way to empowered PWA experience with significant advancements in the way Magento will deliver mobile capabilities. Read the Press Release.

And that’s a wrap! You can find the latest session presentations on the Agenda descriptions page, and videos will be made available soon on both the Agenda and Speakers pages. Mark the date for Imagine 2019: May 13-15 at the Wynn Las Vegas.