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Adobe launches commerce-based microservices across its clouds

Other enhancements include Sensei AI-powered image optimization and personalized Fluid Experiences, plus a preview of profile targeting in physical stores.

Barry Levine on January 16, 2018 at 2:14 pm

Adobe announced today a variety of new Experience Cloud features, including the introduction of commerce-based, accessible microservices.

Director of Commerce Program Errol Denger told me that these 20 microservices are flexible, portable small programs offering such functions as shopping cart, wish list and inventory query. He said that Adobe is the first provider of marketing-focused clouds to offer these functions as microservices.

Each microservice consists of a business object, business logic and connectors between business and commerce platforms, and the services support unlimited loads.

Through microservices, these commerce functions are available with identical messaging, user flow and functions across Adobe’s clouds, and the client companies that use Adobe’s platforms can modify them via JavaScript in order to make messaging or user flow conform with their brand.

While they are being delivered first across Adobe as micro-services offering commerce capabilities, the company said it intends to expand them with some of the capabilities present in its other clouds.

Previously, Denger said, microservices had existed in the background of Adobe’s clouds. These are Adobe’s first accessible microservices that allow client companies to create experiences.

The microservices are also integrated with external order management services, such as CommerceTools, Elastic Path, Digital River, Hybris and Magento.

In addition to the announcement of the new microservices at the NRF retail show in New York City, Adobe also announced a variety of other commerce-related enhancements to its platform.

Optimization, Hadoop, 3D VR

Experience Manager Assets now employs Adobe’s Sensei AI layer to automatically adjust, crop and optimize images for specific device types and bandwidths based around an image’s focal point, resulting in file sizes that can be reduced by as much as 70 percent.

Previously, Adobe head of retail Michael Klein told me, image optimization was based on presets for specific types of URL calls. Now, it’s based on actual data from the specific call for an image.

Adobe Campaign now allows for the direct use of data stored in big data software framework Hadoop, enabling the development of pricing or demand models and the querying and segmentation of data without importing the data into Campaign.

Additionally, Adobe Experience Manager Assets will soon provide panoramic and 3D VR viewers, and those images can be modified via a new integration with Adobe Dimension CC.

Sensei is also now being used to assist Fluid Experiences, which was rolled out last year. Experiences allows a marketer to create a master experience of a given messaging, which is then automatically adapted to the vehicle where it’s presented, such as Pinterest, Facebook or a point-of-sale installation. Now, Sensei can account for the kind of device and the likely recipient of the messaging, thus personalizing Fluid Experiences.

Adobe also previewed a research labs project that essentially allows user profiles to be utilized live in physical stores. In it, foot traffic is monitored live in brick-and-mortar stores, and they are segmented by such parameters as loyalty, last visit data and preferences for message targeting through the store’s mobile app.

About The Author

Barry Levine

Barry Levine covers marketing technology for Third Door Media. Previously, he covered this space as a Senior Writer for VentureBeat, and he has written about these and other tech subjects for such publications as CMSWire and NewsFactor. He founded and led the web site/unit at PBS station Thirteen/WNET; worked as an online Senior Producer/writer for Viacom; created a successful interactive game, PLAY IT BY EAR: The First CD Game; founded and led an independent film showcase, CENTER SCREEN, based at Harvard and M.I.T.; and served over five years as a consultant to the M.I.T. Media Lab. You can find him at LinkedIn, and on Twitter at xBarryLevine.