In this week's Industrial Talk Podcast we're talking to Yoav Kutner, Founder and CEO of Oro, Inc. about "Change Management through Digital Transformation and the Role of B2B eCommerce". Get the answers to your "eCommerce" questions along with Yoav's unique insight on the “How” on this Industrial Talk interview!

You can find out more about Yoav and the wonderful team at Oro, Inc. on leveraging Digital Transformation for your eCommerce business by the links below. Finally, get your exclusive free access to the Industrial Academy and a series on “Why You Need To Podcast” for Greater Success in 2020. All links designed for keeping you current in this rapidly changing Industrial Market. Learn! Grow! Enjoy!

YOAV KUTNER'S CONTACT INFORMATION:

Personal LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/yoavkutner/

Company LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/oro-inc/

Company Website: https://oroinc.com/

Company Twitter: https://twitter.com/oro_inc

Free Oro Demo:  https://oroinc.com/b2b-ecommerce/demo/

PODCAST VIDEO:

https://youtu.be/OD9Tm35uHnY

THE STRATEGIC REASON "WHY YOU NEED TO PODCAST":

OTHER GREAT INDUSTRIAL RESOURCES:

CAP Logistics: https://www.caplogistics.com/

Hitachi Vantara: https://www.hitachivantara.com/en-us/home.html

Industrial Marketing Solutions:  https://industrialtalk.com/industrial-marketing/

Industrial Academy: https://industrialtalk.com/industrial-academy/

Industrial Dojo: https://industrialtalk.com/industrial_dojo/

Safety With Purpose Podcast: https://safetywithpurpose.com/

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PODCAST TRANSCRIPT:

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

companies, platform, b2b, magento, open source, people, business, conference, changing, industry, website, customer, product, big, world, talk, oro, b2c ecommerce, online, absolutely

00:03

Welcome to the industrial talk podcast with Scott MacKenzie. Scott is a passionate industry professional dedicated to transferring cutting edge industry focused innovations and trends while highlighting the men and women who keep the world moving. So put on your hard hat, grab your work boots, and let's go. All right. Welcome to the industrial talk podcast, a podcast that is dedicated to industry heroes such as yourself. But if you're looking out on video, I'm pointing at you right there. Yeah, that's you. You're bold, you're brave. You're daring greatly. you innovate like nobody's business. And you're changing lives, and you're changing the world as we speak. And that's why this podcast is here to celebrate you. Thank you very much for what you are doing. All right, we got another one. And you're saying to yourself, Scott, you always have great interviews? Yes, I do. Because industry is great. And people are great. So get used to it, because that's what we're all about. Yoav ever

00:59

could nurse. Okay, that's good. That's why Oh, a Kutner. And if you go out to his stat card, his LinkedIn stat card, you will quickly notice that he is smarter than I am. Alright, let's get cracking here. All right, we've got a couple of things that we've got to start to

01:19

do some business here. All right, I'm all about education, you know that that's what this platform is all about educating, and I'm all about collaborating, I'm all about innovation, you got to do that. If you want to survive, rebuild and prosper in this new world, you're gonna have to educate all the time. You can't come to me and say, Scott, I don't know how to educate. It's, it's a world wide web out there. There's a lot of great stuff in it. And the industrial talk podcast is dedicated to that education. Now I want to point out something that is just absolutely spectacular. This was brought to you by those wonderful people at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee. It is the connected systems Institute. Now just go out to uw m.edu, forward slash CSI, get all that information and they're just educating the workforce of the future. So we talk about industry for Dotto digital transformation in everything underneath. And that organization is absolutely Dedicated To Your Success. How can you can't you can't argue against that either. This platform is just really just chock full of great stuff for you.

02:24

You'll have How are you doing? Oh, I'm doing fine. How you doing? I'm well, thank you very much. Thank you very much for being on the podcast. I'm excited about this conversation. As you can tell, I've got your to get your website up. I've got your stat card up. And I've got pretty much everything about you up even your form up. And

02:45

so we've got about about five days of information to cut into about 20 minutes of a conversation. We're not going to do that.

02:53

All right. For the listeners out there. Give us a little 411 on who you are and why you're such an incredible technology professional. Absolutely. Well, thank you for that. I I've never heard that I'm an incredible technological person. But we'll say we'll take it we'll take

03:11

your your your LinkedIn stat card is lying. Because it's it is

03:15

although your your

03:20

All right. So yeah, let me talk a bit about so again, like I mentioned when we were first contacted, I'm around for a while. We talked I talked with you. Yeah, it was around with mainframes, Vax computers. I've seen a lot of things taking over. I remember just to show you how not smart I am. When the first time somebody showed me the internet that was like that's a fad. Nobody's gonna look at these green screen withholdings data. And so, you know, that's the first time I saw

03:51

you

03:54

a big one. Yeah, there goes the smart compliment.

04:00

You know, I was listening to these private networks and stuff like that. That said, once it's started taking over

04:08

my claim to fame was co founding a company called Magento and 2004. Later we released a product called Magento. That was a b2c e commerce platform and open source one at that so we can talk about a bit the open source kind of approach and strategy as we call it. And that platform did very well. We got really good adoption I think at our height when I left it was about 35% market share of all online b2c e commerce stores. Yeah, that was great. With no number with no number two, No, nobody came second almost It was like very, very rare category. Maybe.

04:45

We were in some countries like Australia, we had 50% were number two was home grown. So we really took the market for the b2c market and that we can borrow some money. Yes, of course. It's my side business.

05:03

So we actually did pretty well with that we got really good

05:07

adoption, and learned a lot of what was happening in the world of e commerce at the time. We later in around 2011, finalized the sale to eBay and PayPal, actually, within eBay. And that went pretty well. I think the the product itself Magento is still around, it was bought by Adobe.

05:27

And now it's taking its own life form, it's ready in their version major version too. So great to see that the brand is still around. I mean, it's been, it's pretty caught 11 years already around. So that's Wow, that's right. That's right. Wow, that is a pretty cool. That's a cool, yeah. It's like, I refer to it as my estranged son, because we don't talk anymore. But I love kind of following up on the progression and success, you know, from the sidelines.

06:00

All right, so let's go down this road. And I want to make sure that the,

06:03

the listeners understand, can you just sort of level set, talk to us a little bit about what open source means?

06:11

Open Source, what does that mean? Well, open source is,

06:16

again, kind of a philosophy where you don't want to patent or close source, which is more the traditional term, but they they have code is that it used to be compiled. And it used to be used as a black box, you didn't see actually how things were written and done and implemented. And you would use the product, if you have to modify it or change it, you were limited to whatever configuration or API, or interface was allowed to you to use. But that was it. What happened.

06:44

I think it's already for many, many years. But definitely the 70 took a lot of momentum was developers that were not interested in copywriting if you want or licensing their software and actually provided the code that they wrote, alongside with their source code, with different licenses, which is actually the open source license, kind of story. But again, we won't get into that. But that license allows you to actually use the code and actually modify it with some limitations or not to your own use. So before all these modern Object Oriented Development and all that, that was like the best way for companies to take something that was very close to what they needed, but not 100%, modify it from the source code, without limitations and making actually sure that that works for everything they need to do. And with the biggest thing is no vendor lock in, because there was no necessarily relationship between the vendor the the actual producer of the software and the company using it, which was beautiful, right, because you would get somebody work and just build on that and use it for your own needs. That said, What happened usually around then open source is an ecosystem of a community of developers community of users, the actual software vendor. And that usually caused these open source tools to get developed so much faster, and adopted faster and get feedback faster, and move faster than the closed source solutions that were very limited. And that's why open source is something that's ongoing for the last 40 years in very high speed. I mean, a lot of people don't even realize and learn when I say people companies we talk to don't even realize that a lot of the tools that they're using are actually based or built on open source code, right that somebody was using. Now today, if we jump ahead a bit, though, this is as technical as we'll get, probably. But if I jumped ahead a few years now, today, the actual source code with older object oriented API's after I mean service oriented architecture and stuff like that maybe is a little bit less relevant, you will not necessarily go and modify the actual core code. But you'll build on top of it extended. But were open source is still very much important is like I said with the license. So what you're actually able to use it how you're able to use it, are you able to resell it, you're able to use it only internally, stuff like that. So it's all about the license today, and how you can actually use it for your own benefit. There's a big case right now going on, you know, with Google and big lawsuit there. So I think we are in a place where today open source is more about the license, the freedom to actually build on that use it commercially. Without again, the vendor lock in, which is the biggest part of so you, if you like the vendor, you work with them. If you don't like the vendor, you actually can invest in your own developers and make sure that technology works. And again, with no limitations, which is if we look at SAS platforms like Salesforce, we talked about Salesforce quickly, you are limited to whatever they expose to you. And you end up building a lot of these custom application living in third worlds around that application, not in exactly that hosting environment, not as efficient and as performance. But when we talk about open source, you can actually start

10:00

They'll modify source code if needed to get extensive use cases. See, and and from my perspective, again, correct me if I'm wrong, I like the speed. Right? Especially today. And when we start looking at, let's say, industry for Dido, all of that whole, it technology itself is just evolving at such a blistering pace. I mean, I just I don't see how you can not

10:24

get more into that open source type of mindset, and be able to deploy solutions that truly meet your business needs as fast as you possibly can. I don't see how you can ignore that. Which then brings us to this, the product that we're going to be talking a little bit about that, once again, listeners out there, it's Oro o. r. o, right, Inc is the.com is the website. The product is a series of Oro and so they got commerce and CRM and platforms and all that stuff. And I'm looking at the website, I didn't just sort of pull this off of my head. I'm just using their website. And I'm just sort of, and the the one that just sort of fascinates me is this Oro-commerce. Can you give us a little sort of background into that? And what is it? Absolutely. So Oro-commerce actually came from what, again, what we learned through the years of at Magento. So we like I said, develop the b2c e commerce platform. The problem was that we started seeing more and more companies that were contacting us that were not necessarily selling directly to consumers, there were more about selling to other companies, which makes them a b2b company.

11:32

We were much younger, and definitely have the ego to match that. And we were open source and flexible, etc. We said you know, we can do anything. So when we got approached, we said, Yeah, absolutely, we can serve your needs, we can build on top of what we we have already. But because we were so focused on the b2c side of the equation of this, yeah, we kind of left a lot of the basic kind of architectural features

11:58

out, right, we didn't focus on them. We didn't even know them about b2b at the time. So when we started working with b2b companies, we saw that fundamental features were missing in the platform. So fast forward, when I left the Magento. Eight months later, we created a new company called aura. And Oro, one of the products we kind of worked was on was the b2b e commerce platform, which is kind of our take on e commerce, but for companies selling to other companies. And so

12:30

yeah, so I got us a step in. So for the listeners out there, let's try to simplify it in a sense, it's like, Hey, I'm Acme, your beta, we can use this platform to engage in commerce Is that it? That's in a nutshell, that's it, we have three main use cases that we kind of talked about, and then we kind of start breaking out from but the first one is exactly what you said, which is the buyer seller interaction. Yeah. And that's the buyer doing some research finding a seller or manufacturer or brand or distributor that he wants to work with, they get in contact to get in touch, submit maybe a request for a quote, or CRISPR, pricing, get this pricing, and then put in an order, right. So taking all that world digitally. That's our main focus, basically, because this world is changing this world is, especially with COVID, we've seen that that conferences, trade shows were not even an option, right? That's where a lot of these b2b business and orders were actually done introductions, etc. So we're really trying to move this whole world digital, that's kind of so so I'm Acme. I'm a buyer and I'm looking for a seller, do I go through the Oro commerce platform to find buy sellers? So I can be in your platform and say, hey, check it out. That's, that's a company and whatever the details associated I can do that in your platform? No, I mean, unless you build the marketplace, which we'll get into that part. But when we're talking, we're just a software provider. We don't provide any services.

14:10

Right. So the best way to find you is where actually most researchers start today is on Google or on any other search engine. I won't get into that war. But let's say any search engine is where today, most researchers and buyers are starting their search today. And that's overtaking any kind of tradeshow, any kind of conference, anything like that. So if you build your site with a platform like ours, you'll be searchable and indexable and then people can actually find you. So you don't have to go through us nobody needs to know who or is we like to be in the in the shop. We like to make other people upfront and successful. So we're not like an eBay for b2b or,

14:53

or anything like that. We are not a marketplace on our own. We do provide a marketplace is one of our features or actual products.

15:00

But we are definitely about running your business, making your business so visible. And that's a big change and a big kind of attitude change, I guess, for b2b companies that they have to be visible online today. They're missing out on so many potential customers, so many potential orders, so many