Adobe is spending a lot of time and effort integrating all the products in the Marketing Cloud.  Paulo Mottadelli, Sr. Manager of Marketing Cloud Product Management walks us through it.
Why does open architecture matter?  10% of the features are used by 90% of the users while many features are only used by only a few users.  He never answered but I assume that an open architecture allows you to cover more features.

Open Architecture

Think about how the web was designed 30 years ago.  Think of http post and get. It’s the same now as it was then.  You can use a url to set data.  Having a system like the Marketing Cloud support that opens up options.
Modularity: a plug-in engine would connect to the host.   A pure plug-in engine would let plug-ins connect to other plug-ins which connect to the hoste.
Open Architecture

• Extensibility required modularization
• Reuse needs cleaner structure
• More use case require generalization

Revolutionize Your Business With Generative AI

From product design and software development to virtual agents, content creation, and reporting, GenAI is transforming business. Our AI experts help you unlock GenAI’s full potential and drive growth.

Let’s Get Started

Open Standards

• Communication patterns
• Architectural rules
• Common interfaces
• No lock-in

Open Source

• More eyeballs working on it
• More use cases supported
• More users or any kinds
• built on more specific use cases

Why Does Open Architecture Matter?

Better Quality, Better Security, Better Sustainability is the short answer.

• Security means that you don’t have to rely on security through obscurity.  You rely on industry standards and peer review.
• Better quality also means better testing.   You can do more test using standardized patterns.
• Integration and extensibility. Modularization and standards allow this.

7 Principles of the Marketing Cloud

1. Open Standards. The core infrastructure is based on open source projects and standards
   1. REST – all about http.
1. OSGi 5 app runtime – Java based modern application stack. It’s extensible and modular
   1. Most dynamic way to deploy Java code.  Can update bundle without restarting application
   2. Bundles are plug-ins
   3. You can have different versions of the same bundle in the same container
   4. You can have bundles with dependencies on other bundles
   5. OSGi also provides security and a thoughtful way to manage services with a service registry
   6. OSGi matters because your app will be outdated sooner rather than later.  Modularity, dynamic code, and manageable bundles allow for this certainty
2. JCR 2.0 (java content repository)
3. All on a Java VM
4. Key components to this philosophy
   1. Apache Jackrabbit for JCR
   2. Apache Lucene
   3. Content Extraction POI, Tika
   4. WEb Framework
   5. Apache Sling
2. Cloud Stack
   1. Shared cloud infrastructure – used by all tenants and products
   2. Big Data infrastructure – used by all tenants and products
3. URLs matter- all urls exposed by the Marketing Cloud are carefully evaluated, designed, and ??
   1. The url in the marketing cloud is well thought out
   2. assets.html/content/mac/geometrixx/banners/adventure.psd
      1. assets.html is global
      2. Geometrixx is the owner
      3. banners and /adventure are the resources
      4. Repository organizes content in the same way as the calling url
4. REST API’s are kings. All of the entites in the marketing cloud can be called via a REST API
   1. They follow a consistent api pattern and allow JSON, url, etc.
   2. retrieve a resource: GET /products/english/18846.html for example
   3. With this approach, you can create cards in your board in teh marketing cloud.  Paolo walked us through this in real time using the POST to put an image into the board.
   4. 4B – CURL power means you should be able to do anything with a curl. If you can’t, there should be a good reason.
5. Browser rules: All UX is based on the assumptoin that html is the baseline
   1. Support JSON for both JS apps and native apps
   2. Native JSON is the phone gap approach
   3. from a browser perspective, you should be able to make a javascript call to get a card with fully formed html.   So take the shareframe or widget, call it and display it outside of the normal Marketing Cloud context.
   4. Paolo showed a demo where a button made a card call as a light box.
      1. His demo card showed that the JS library imported with the card allowed full interaction including making a test comment outside and then going to the system and finding that same test comment.
6. Unified UX – All of the Marketing cloud shares one UX and one architecture and one infrastructure stack for user interaction
   1. It’s all based on a common UI framework for web applications
   2. It’s backend agnostic
   3. It unifies all Adobe apps in the Marketing Cloud
   4. Responsive
   5. Rich widgets
   6. Mobile first
   7. Cutting edge technologies like css3, html5, and jquery
   8. This includes the next gen Adobe Experience Manager btw
   9. 6B – one infrastructure.   It’s key to the common Marketing Cloud experience. Everything is a service so that makes it even easier
      1. campaign service
      2. media optimizer service
      3. social service
      4. etc.
7. Cross-solution concepts- Share the concepts across the entire solution.  If you use concepts in a campaign like channels, content, assets, metrcis, etc………. then you should carry those concepts over to the other 5 products in the Marketing Cloud.  Don’t confuse the user.
   1. Wow, this may be expensive as they integrate a bunch of products but it’s a beautiful vision
   2. Related to this is the fact that the cloud provide open widgets to access cross-cutting resources.  Again, wow, one call to get info from two services / systems.
   3. Paolo showed him createing a new post in WordPress.  Wordpress text editor called the asset widget to allow the WordPress user to find and grab an asset for the blog post.

Conclusion

Adobe Marketing Cloud is demonstrably open. It’s open because it’s built on

1. Open Architecture
2. Open Standards
3. Open Source

Overall, a good philosophy presentation with some nice demos.