I recently had the privilege to meet with Adobe executives at their Customer Experience Center (CEC) in San Jose, CA where we had the opportunity to talk about the direction of our partnership. While there, I also gained some insights on future product releases. It was an educational experience for sure, and I left there feeling even more optimistic about Adobe’s future and our involvement in continuing to help our customers implement their software.
Product Direction
AEM’s future is bright with 6.3. No release date announced yet, but we did learn about some really cool features that are coming:
- TOUCH UI – Development is still the highest priority on the list. Creating a unified look and feel across all of these originally disparate systems will be a big accomplishment.
- Experience Fragments – Content fragments were released in 6.2 as a Sites/DAM feature. In 6.3, they plan to release experience fragments which will be full layouts of content stores as chunks of content to be re-used across the platform. Experience fragments can be made up of other content fragments.
- Mobile Integration for Forms – Combining AEM Forms and AEM Mobile to create better forms integration for mobile devices.
- Better optimization for Mobile
Microsoft / Adobe Partnership
We dove a little deeper into the reasons behind the move and learned that Microsoft will be encouraging and supporting customers who use Azure to move toward Adobe’s Digital Marketing Platform. By doing so, they will be able to take advantage of Microsoft’s BI platform for computing complex data algorithms within a highly scalable cloud architecture.
We’re really excited to see this unfold, and the announcement has created some excitement within Microsoft and for their partners. Perficient won partner of the year across all three U.S. regions in 2016 and was named National Partner of the year in 2014. We’re excited about the prospect of courting our base of Microsoft clients toward using Adobe’s platform. Rich Wood highlights this new partnership in a recent post.
DMP Baby!
What I was most impressed with was the direction they’re taking around the core of their platform. Adobe’s cloud based Data Management Platform (DMP), is being normalized to support a wide variety of data streams coming from various technology providers. Adobe’s data lake is marketing focused, constructed to support mind-blowing amounts of data. Technology partners can dock their boat full of data and easily transport data to their DMP without having to write any middleware code to support the transfer. Data transformation is performed by the folks monitoring the dock.
Why? First, Adobe wants the data. Studies show that predictive analytics computations are much more accurate when you have more data. Algorithms used to analyze and compute complex data queries are important too, but the emphasis is on more data. Second, Adobe recognizes that they will never own all of the data. An exchange of information will be required to facilitate its desire to provide much better predictive marketing analytics and AI to their customer base. You can’t get around it. They’re making the investment that all technology vendors will benefit from in the future, a considerable investment if you think about how the IoTs will impact the vendor landscape. Already, Adobe has been playing around with four (4) practical applications in beta with a planned release of October 31, 2016. They are:
- Cross Channel orchestration (for attribution) – Helping determine the weighted value of individual KPIs that contribute to a single conversion goal.
- Unified Profile Service – For better 360-degree views of customer that will help with creating a deterministic and predictive user profiles.
- Device Co-op – User identification across versions device types but recoding as a single event, rather than an event for each device.
- Adobe Digital Index – Creating predictive insights for questions like, “What products will be hot items for the upcoming holiday season?”
Great things are definitely on the horizon. Stay tuned for future updates by signing up for our weekly digest below.
