“If you can connect all the dots between what you see today and where you want to go, then it’s probably not ambitious enough or aspirational enough.”
– CEO: Shantanu Narayen
Business Model Innovation
Product as a service
Adobe’s success in the last five years marks the re-birth of the company in many ways. The most incredible part of this growth story stems from its mission to enable people and enterprises to change the world through digital experiences.
Adobe has built the most comprehensive platform for customer experience management. Adobe has literally started from scratch to reimagine customer journeys.
While many other players in the industry are looking at digital tools in silos or as a tick mark on their digital transformation checklist, Adobe’s unique approach and success comes from the leadership’s immaculate focus on profoundly understanding how users discover, try, buy, use and renew their products.
Adobe tied up with Microsoft to build the entire customer experience platform using the power of Azure cloud. This added scalability and a frictionless growth experience both for technology enablers within the firm and for customers outside.
Marketo + Magento + Adobe Experience = Winning Digital Strategy
Eyebrows were raised when Adobe recently acquired the cloud-based marketing software provider Marketo. This is Adobe’s largest acquisition to date. The value it will derive spending $4.75 billion is nothing compared to the end-to-end bouquet of marketing, analytics, branding and content creation softwares that Adobe will be able to package and sell to companies and individuals. The acquisition only strengthens Adobe’s customer experience cloud and the company’s ability to deliver an unrivaled set of solutions for delivering transformative customer experiences across a range of industries and clients ranging from small start-ups to large enterprises.
Steve Lucas, ex-CEO Marketo, outlined his vision of the combined offering in a blog post. He said, “The combination of Marketo and Adobe’s Experience Cloud will form the definitive system of engagement for B2C and B2B enterprise marketers.”
Marketo’s has exceptional lead management, account-level data, and multi-channel marketing capabilities. All of this would be combined with Adobe’s rich behavioral dataset. This would create the most advanced, unified view of the customer not only at an individual but also at an account level. The result will be an unprecedented level of marketing engagement, automation, and attribution power. All of this with a goal of delivering end-to-end, exceptional experiences for our customers, where and when they want them.”
Further, the acquisition of Magento at US$1.7 billion will help Adobe make every shopping experience commerce-enabled. It could do so by providing the basic platform to B2C and B2B users to engage and close transactions online. This completes the journey from Adobe’s standpoint in regards to its vision for the Adobe Experience Cloud. Further, acquiring Magento gives the company that e-commerce underpinning that allows customers to finalize a digital transaction that started online with digital marketing tools Adobe already offers.
The Impact
Adobe ended fiscal 2018 with $9.03 billion in combined revenues post deal closure. Also, digital media revenue grew 26 percent year-on-year. Moreover, the digital experience segment which includes the Adobe Experience Cloud subscription ended with a 20 percent year-on-year revenue growth rate.
Future
To make customer experience central to its offerings is Adobe’s future strategy. Also to enable B2B and B2C clients to unlock the power of Adobe to build memorable and personalized customer journeys.