Adobe kicked off Adobe Summit 2017 with a Business Partner Day. Several Adobe executives spoke about Adobe’s growth over the past few years, the strategies they have in place and recent performance numbers. Adobe embarked on their cloud strategy back in 2011 and in 2016 Adobe had 20% YoY increase in revenue. In their Marketing Cloud, Adobe conducted 100 trillion+ customer data transactions which is a 60% increase over a key competitor. Finally, Adobe added LiveFyre and TubeMogul to the platforms and made strategic investments in the advertising sector.
Looking ahead to 2017, Adobe recognized Q1 revenue of $477M, which is a new record. Adobe’s CFO said that they were a $6B company in 2016, expect to be $7B in 2017 and $8B in 2018. These numbers lead to 30% growth in bottom line numbers.
In terms of market demand, Adobe sees the following as key part of their go to market strategy:
- Customer Intelligence
- Advertising
- Connected Experiences.
Three core beliefs are driving Adobe’s development and marketing efforts:
- Experience first
- The art of content has to merge with the Science of Data
- Need a standard data model – a single language for the customer experience
- Intelligence Everywhere
- Computational Creativity
- Understanding Documents
- Customer Intelligence
- Adobe Sensei is the commitment to deliver intelligence
- Open Ecosystem
- From solutions to platform
- Build experience ecosystem
- API First
With regards to their technology, Adobe talked about key aspects of their cloud technologies. Starting at the top of the picture, Adobe I/O is a new API based, server-less, deployment-less model that allows developers to create code that the Adobe platform will automatically pick up and execute.
Adobe I/O Events is another step on top of Adobe I/O that provides programmatic access to I/O events. Types of events include asset creation, updated or edited. In one solution, an asset is created and the I/O Events system captures that event, then enhances the asset with meta data and finally publishes the enhanced asset out to various systems.
Adobe Sensei is there term for the artificial aspects of their platforms and focuses on content analytics in addition to machine learning and other AI technologies. Adobe is focusing on three major areas for AI Applications – creative, documents, and marketing.
Adobe Future Concepts
Adobe believes that a Standard Data Model must underlay the platform so that all tools and systems have a common way to access content and data.
We were promised lots of amazing technology announcements at the opening session of Adobe Summit 2017. Come back tomorrow to find out what those announcements mean for our Adobe customers.
