Customer Data, Faster Content, and Platform Evolution:

March 28, 2022

This is the second part of our summary of Adobe Summit 2022. If anyone asks you for your take on the digital behemoth’s annual event, we’ve got you covered.

Read the first three trends here. 

Trend #4: Owning the CDP business 

Martin Wammen, VP MarTech Consultancy Services at Valtech, doesn’t think it’s a big surprise that Adobe is working to standardize machine learning models, especially around Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) and marketing automation. The change of note is Adobe’s maturity level. “From my point of view, Adobe is now at the point where they are delivering on the promise of a real-time CDP,” says Wammen.  

What this means:  

• CDP applications are becoming more intelligent so that you don’t have to hire a big team of data scientists to determine if a customer visiting your site is going to make a purchase.  
• There’s less latency. You don’t have to wait for a user to visit multiple pages before you can implement personalization rules.  

• Manufacturers and distributors will also benefit from this development. Rather than personalizing for an individual, they can create more complex visitor profiles that cater to different personas within a company. Purchases can be made online, circumventing costly calls to service centers.  

Why CTOs are perking up about Adobe’s CDP: Most of the CDP competitors are built on WS, Google Cloud, or a combination of multiple clouds. Technical teams appreciate that the Adobe Experience Platform and real-time CDP is built on top of Microsoft Azure infrastructure and Services.  

The conclusion? Adobe is working to embed data analysis capabilities into their products so that data and analysis go hand-in-hand.   

Trend #5: Boosting Content Velocity  

Matthias Wermund, VP Global Technology / Adobe Practice Lead at Valtech, lists all the ways Adobe is making it easier to break down siloes for collaboration and content publication: 

1. Workfront: Adobe acquired Workfront, the work management, issue tracking, document management and time tracking tool in 2020 and has since put significant investment toward integrating it into other more established Adobe product offerings. Marketing has evolved and Adobe is trying to help people manage the complexity.  
2. Adobe Sign: Request and (importantly!) track signatures (digital or wet).  
3. Adobe Forms: Adobe has two offerings when it comes to forms: AEM Form, which is great for complex, multistep forms and data processing endpoints, and AEM’s out-of-the-box solution.  
4. Wizards: Need guidance? The Wizard for AEM forms authoring shows relevant templates and asks questions to steer decisions.  
5. Content fragments: A new dashboard permits users to track and manage content at a larger scale.  
6. Learning Manager: The newly rebranded Adobe Learning Manager comes with new capabilities and the ability to integrate with other Adobe products. “This will be useful for internal enablement programs for employees on their intranets and for customer retention,” says Wermund.  
7. End-to-end tracking. Before, a writer or graphic designer would use an asset link integration to access an asset and update it. The changes would be available to the content author but not to the marketing team. With Workfront, those information silos diminish.  

Trend #6: Platform Evolution 

When it comes to cloud services, there weren’t exciting or ground-breaking changes announced. But this makes its own, subtle statement: the Adobe offer is mature. With 500 customers, 16,000 terabytes of data and 1.7 billion requests daily, the Adobe solution is highly used and trustworthy.  

The need for a unified interface: Most modern data systems leverage many data source endpoints. This is particularly true for commerce systems due to order processing using customer data and other API gateways. Merchants require a unified interface with a commerce system on the frontend and access to a wide ecosystem of backends. “You don’t need to do point-to-point integration,” Wermund explains. “But it’s about having an interface that can be reused for different frontends, in different use cases.”  

App Builder is a major component in Adobe’s platform evolution. First made publicly available earlier in 2022, this serverless platform deploys custom logic and custom interfaces on the experience cloud, making it truly scalable.  

Expert advice on platform evolution: If you’ve been with Adobe for a while, you’ll know that it takes some time to get used to the product. As members of the Adobe pre-release program for App Builder, our experts see how powerful it can be. We recommend exploring what App Builder can do for your business. 

Want to hear directly from our experts? Listen to their lightning-fast overview of these 6 trends.