Adobe Heads Pack for Web Content Management Says Forrester, Adobe’s Take
by Barb Mosher Zinck | February 12, 2015 12:17 pm
It’s always good to talk with Loni Stark, Adobe Senior Director of Strategy and Product Marketing. She understands the market for digital customer experience deeply and believes Adobe’s place in it is well-earned. For her, stating that web content management is the backbone of digital experience, is great. Maybe we have talked about it for a while, but she feels to see it finally officially declared is a big deal. And it shows that Adobe is continuing on the right path.
Adobe’s Take on Its Leadership Position
Maybe even more important to Stark though is that the report is an acknowledgement of the satisfied customers that Adobe has, as shown in the scoring on Reference Customer Assessment (Adobe had the only perfect 5.0 rating). Note that the customers surveyed were a combination of Adobe provided references and Forrester clients.
Adobe Experience Manager is the WCM platform, and it integrates with the Marketing Cloud to provide a complete digital experience offering. Forrester pointed to strengths like the practitioners toolkit, partner support and mobile support. It listed areas of improvement as digital asset management integration, intranet/extranet install bases and cloud hosting.
More Mobile App Talk Needed
The one thing that surprised Stark was a lack of reference to Adobe’s capabilities in mobile app development. Adobe introduced Experience Manager Apps at its Summit last March. This provides both marketers and developers with the ability to build and manage mobile apps within Experience Manager. This App platform was listed in Gartner’s Mobile App Platform Magic Quadrant. Stark says that any modern WCM solution should have an answer to the mobile apps need.
Adobe is Looking Internally
In terms of the internal use of Experience Manager, it’s something they have talked about. Stark says she is seeing a new trend toward employee engagement and has seen companies apply the same technology/investments internally. She notes that Adobe’s Intranet team recently won an award for the transformation of its intranet. The key is success here is transparency and authenticity, the same way brands communicate with customers.
It’s Not About the Type of Cloud
For cloud, Stark says customer’s don’t care about the type of cloud exactly. They look at the level of customization, the relative costs to the business value, and the time to set up. Adobe has looked and made a major push to cloud the last year or so, and they’ve had great growth in the cloud for Experience Manager.
What Adobe does is look at each service and how it’s best served in the cloud. For Experience Manager, the content management piece is managed cloud, but there are parts of the solution, like Video Delivery, that are SaaS-based. The decision to go SaaS or not is really based on the goals you are trying to achieve.
Stark also says that while they are continuing to look at the SaaS model, it’s also important to provide a solution that gives Adobe’s clients the customization capabilities they want.
Looking Forward – No Secrets Revealed
I hope you don’t think Stark spilled the beans on what’s coming and I’m just not telling you. But she did give some rough hints.
Mobile, of course, is front and center. Adobe continues to look at mobile apps, not simply a pure-web play. Every brand Stark talks to tells her they are look at mobile web/apps as well as web. And it’s not mobile in silo, it’s all about the overall experience.
The other thing she says is that Adobe continue to look at ways to make it easier to use Experience Manager and the Marketing Cloud.
We’ll see much more in a few weeks when the 2015 Adobe Summit takes place.
I’ll leave you with this thought – Stark says Adobe is only beginning – they are building amazing things. It’s Stark’s team who will work to provide the thought leadership, best practices and practical advice to customers on how to use these innovations to create great digital experiences.
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