Adobe Symposium-Part 2 - Technology Roadmap and Future Direction

In the first part I talked about key industry trends that stood out directly or indirectly during the Adobe Symposium. It was however, primarily, (and understandably) an event for Adobe to strut their stuff and showcase what they’ve got going end to end.

One of the chief complaints when working with the Adobe ecosystem, is the lack of an end to end state vision that allows customers to fully take advantage of their investments as a part of their roadmap for digital strategy. So when you get a rare glimpse into how their various products and services sit together in end to end it’s quite satisfying and a bit of an eye opener. When I look back at the collated list, there’s a LOT going on, from new offerings to restructure of existing ones

I will list them down below. Some of them are in their natural categories as presented by the speakers, while some had mentions peppered across various sessions that I felt needed better classification.   

 Adobe Cloud Platform

The grouping that brings together their key cloud offerings

1.      Adobe Experience Cloud

2.      Adobe Document Cloud

3.      Adobe Creative Cloud

The major new restructure of their offering, is itself composed of three separate cloud offerings (see below)

By grouping their core services in this way, Adobe have made for a more logical grouping of what they have to offer as well as well as a allowed for better extensibility of their platform as well as integration with their ecosystem.

It also alludes to the fact that if you get one of their cloud offerings, you should expect a more seamless integration to others. This can be both a good thing (e.g. if you are invested into a number of Adobe tech) and a bad thing (e.g. if you only need bits of their tech and/or have security restrictions that need isolation data or intelligence across offerings)

Adobe Experience Cloud

Comprised of three major cloud based offerings

1. Analytics Cloud

• Analytics
• Audience Manager

2. Adverstising Cloud

• Media Optimiser
• Ad Lens

3. Adobe Marketing Cloud

• Adobe Experience Manager
• Campaign ( f.k.a. Neolane)
• Target
• Primetime
• Social

Straight off the bat, you can see that you will need ( at the very least ) bits of Adobe Marketing Cloud as well as Analytics Cloud to make a meaningful start of a Digital Experience Platform that is able to deliver personalised experience as well measure its efficacy across channels.

A potential tech roadmap could have you leverage AEM, and Target to serve content based on segments created on target as a pilot, and then later take the plunge into Audience Manager for a more industrialised scale management of your segments.

At this stage, licensing is unclear, i.e. if you will be able to avail bits of each cloud without paying for the rest.

Also, Social for me is a bit of a conundrum – as Adobe has acquired Livefyre recently and favours it more than the erstwhile Adobe Social offering. It and Livefyre differ significantly in their scope and offerings and I see likelihood for a lot of confusion in this space unless they clarify quickly.

Adobe Document Cloud

Comprised of Acrobat and Adobe Sign – This seems to be the main channel for Adobe to promote bringing digital to document processes, and while these are powerful services in their own right, I do feel they cannibalize AEM forms (erstwhile LiveCycle) which doesn’t get nearly as much mention as it should w.r.t. document automation.

Creative Cloud

The key offering for creative content production as well as Adobe Spark and Stock – aimed at providing sources of original content to craft experiences out of for various industries.

Other Direct Product Offerings

Adobe Sensei

Adobe’s fledgling machine learning platform.It was one of those things that was talked about a lot without talking about it directly through its mentions pretty much throughout the entire symposium, from keynote sessions on analytics to sneak peek Sparks sessions . 

Functionality that was shown off was impressive and were across a range of use cases

1.      Analysis of content to suggest personal experiences

2.      Predictive analysis on analytics data

3.      Simulated customer journeys

4.      APIs for facial recognition

5.      Semantic Analysis

6.      Smart tagging of assets ( introduced in AEM 6.2 )

I suspect that this is the coming together of various automation and machine learning initiatives in Adobe under a single umbrella. Even though it may not be fully integrated and may have only specific offerings based need based development, I think this is a very positive and critical step for Adobe – they do not want to get left behind. Machine Learning has already started to become a key foundational technology for future digital solutions.

As always with machine learning, the focus seems to be on simplifying known and tedious tasks of collating the data before moving onto predictive analytics.

Adobe I/O

Brings together documentation across their offerings as well as provide API interfaces to them allow – effectively opening up their platforms to people to integrate with as they see fit. I believe this is a really good move as it , in a sense , allows for crowd source innovative integration across their systems - not only does it serve customers that may want to move faster than what Adobe has to offer at the time , but also allows for discovery of patterns they can accommodate into their future offerings.

Other Functional Offerings:

The offerings below were not grouped as specific products and were talked about sporadically in various sessions, but collecting them together, they do reveal an impressive set of capabilities across key areas

Analytics

Adobe Launch ( Next Gen DTM ) - This built-from-scratch offering ( though not yet launched )seeks to replace DTM and boasts self-hosting of tags OOB (This is a big for enterprises!!). No clear mention of server to server capability though. –Migration paths from DTM are not yet made clear – Watch this space! Check this great post for some pre-analysis:

Virtual Analyst - looking at anomalous spikes and dips with attribution through machine learning

Integration of advertising cloud with analytics dashboard - getting behavioural and partner data for better contribution analysis.

Adobe Insights – A more souped up version for integrating AEM with Analytics as well as third party data to get insights on efficacy and suitability of content  directly and in-context to the digital producer

Analytics SMS integration allowing for data alerts as well as capability for handling text based commands to run reports.

Data

Strategic Partnership Microsoft CRM Dynamics – This was announced some time ago, but worth re-iterating in the context of the summit. This partnership allows for solution that not only brings capabilities of the marketing cloud to CRM, but also potentially reduces the gap between personalisation of unauthenticated and unidentified consumers and named customers .This should allow Adobe bring thought leadership on digital solutions that span the life-cycle of a customer from the prospect stage, instead of waiting for clients to cross those hurdles themselves.

Common Data Model   - Mentioned as a part of the Adobe Cloud announcement, a common dictionary for transferring data across providers as well as offerings. I could not find specific information on this, which is a shame, as in the plan for establishing data ecosystems, some commonality of context, perhaps even a standard of data exchange is going to be essential.

Adobe Device Co-Op – Yet to be launched in Australia, but one of growing data sharing marketplaces that allows customers to share data of user devices to better track them across touch points and companies.  

Adobe Data Exchange Platform  - Like above, a data market place that allows for buying and selling third party data.  

Note: It goes without saying that any solution that involves gleaning greater insights on customer behaviour, tracking their online movements and preferences, privacy & security and alignment to local and international law are of paramount importance and should be considered as key inputs to such solutions.

Others

Ad Management – Managing your ad campaigns, from bidding on ad exchanges, and turning them off or on from a central control center.

Adobe Experience Manager Content Services – allowing you syndicate experiences to screens that you don’t own – almost like a marketplace of digital billboards that you could rent out.

Closing Thoughts

Till recently , Adobe were / potentially still are at risk of getting left behind by faster more agile customers that are well on their way for digital transformation and are seeking to integrate various technologies and provide end to end solutions. With the spate of acquisitions and the time it takes to integrate them , Adobe have found themselves on the back foot when it came to providing thought leadership on how their end state vision plays out.

However, looking at the above, it’s clear that Adobe has been very busy.

This seems way more focused and all pervasive than the somewhat lacking ADEP offering.  The whole company is in a restructuring of offerings to establish foundation platforms to build upon for the future.

There is also a lot of energy being put into establishing various market places and external partnerships to help cement their relevancy in the areas of providing end to end solutions for digital transformation across industries.

This does seem to be coming at a cost of building out core cohesive functionality in their core offerings such as building out capabilities in the marketing cloud to truly facilitate industrial scale content and experience as a service (Check this post). Some capabilities e.g. document automation already seem to be cannibalized.

Having said that, Adobe I/O may be a masterstroke which follows in the lines of the open source industry and allowing for crowd-source innovation for integrating their own offerings into solutions.

All in all for now, Adobe seem to be practicing what they are preaching   – with Digital Transformation it’s all or nothing.

Note: It should be noted that not all of the above offerings are mature or are fully available commercially. Check with your Adobe rep for specific details