Content and data form foundation of Adobe’s M&A strategy

Contact: Scott Denne

At its annual marketing user conference, Adobe laid out a strategy to extend throughout and beyond marketing by touching on every part of the customer experience with content and data offerings. The company has accumulated the biggest and broadest suite of marketing software products among any of its enterprise software peers. However, it will take many years for marketing software to become a mature segment. For Adobe to maintain its position, it will need to continue to expand its offerings.

Despite the hyperbole about the level of technology spending among CMOs, marketing software remains in an early – though promising – stage. Spending continues to rise and the landscape is fragmented. It will likely remain so as new forms of media and mobile devices continue to sprout. And with them, new methods of customer engagement and increasingly fragmented audiences and data sets. The exits of enterprise software vendors such as Teradata, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and SDL provide Adobe and other remaining incumbents with an opportunity to gain market share and push into emerging corners of this category.

Adobe began its foray into digital marketing with acquisitions – first website analytics company Omniture (2009), and then website content management vendor Day Software (2010). Those two products currently sit at the core of Adobe’s marketing suite and much of the growth in its Marketing Cloud, which currently generates $1.4bn in trailing revenue, comes through the sale of them or cross-selling other offerings to customers that already use Adobe for analytics or content management.

As Adobe looks beyond marketing and toward becoming the data and content layer that powers the customer experience landscape, it could expand into areas such as e-commerce platforms, cross-channel attribution and customer data platforms. Subscribers to 451 Research’s Market Insight Service can access a full report on Adobe’s strategy, product portfolio, competitive positioning and potential targets in the marketing ecosystem.