Written by: Larry Goodfellow
Adobe’s Shift to Cloud Based Business
In a recent article by Patrick Seitz, entitled Adobe Systems CEO Touts ‘Textbook Transition’ To Cloud recently published on Investor’s Business Daily, the author got a chance to sit down with the CEO of Adobe Systems (ADBE) and discuss their overwhelming five year success, as well as the plans for the future. Recently Adobe has made the shift from selling desktop software such as Photoshop, Premiere and Illustrator to a cloud based business model and expanded to a provider of marketing, and digital media software and services.
Seitz writes that Adobe is a crucial link for consumer-facing businesses who are seeking to transform their business digitally. This transformation happens through creating content and sharing this content over multiple social media platforms as well as understanding and tracking which content is making an impact with viewers. “Adobe brings together content-creation tools with data insights — allowing companies to determine such things as which online marketing and advertising campaigns work best and how people are engaging with their content.” The link between online marketing and insight is a crucial component for their customers.
Customer Journey
When asked how Adobe is helping companies in the digital transformation, the CEO Shantanu Narayen stated, “when people think about digital transformation, among the things they think about is what’s the customer journey and how do we map out that customer journey across all of the channels?” He goes on to state that they help map out the customer journey over all of the channels. They also help identify who is the customer that they are trying to target and what campaigns need to be run to reach those customers. Then once they are reached they seek to find out what that experience was like. The process is two-fold, first is the creation of content through digital media, and then the digital marketing which allows touch points through apps, web, and in-store devices. The digital marketing helps to monetize, measure, and mobilize the content. This link between creating content and monetizing its impact and reach is crucial to the future of digital media.
The interview goes on to ask Narayen about Adobe’s shift from purely software based products to a business intelligence company. In 2009, Adobe purchased Omniture, a Big Data company. The challenge at Adobe was to take all of the data and normalize it as well as get usable insights from it so that businesses can make decisions based on it. Another important acquisition for Adobe was the advertising software platform TubeMogul.
Video is the Future
The move to video has been carefully thought out and well planned. Narayen commented about video when he said, “We have always been very bullish about video. For many years we have been saying that video is going to completely move to IP (internet protocol)-based networks.” Besides TubeMogul, Adobe also has a product called Primetime which is meant to deliver and monetize video content writes Seitz.
In the interview, Narayen thanks the Adobe staff for the “textbook transition.” The company has remarkably re-positioned itself from selling desktop software to becoming a business intelligence company and has become a great example of a relatively seamless transition. The company has been able to understand the need companies have to go digital, which involves creating content, and then monetizing that content and measuring the reach and impact of that content so that they can effectively reach their customers.
Two components of this venture seem to be video, and data analysis. While Big Data can be useful for tracking user journeys, Narayen spoke to a key problem with Big Data, and that is gaining insight into why the customer behaved the way they did and this is why qualitative research for online communities is so great, as it helps provide the why that Big data isn’t able to offer. Not to mention the reporting tool for online communities that allows you to go back into past discussions and look for trends and patterns.
Re-positioning a company is no small task. If you would like to find out further information about how market research online community software can help you understand your customers better or be used to help understand customer journey, please contact us at Insightrix Communities.
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