August 20, 2011

Article on CMSWire.com about Adobe's Aspirations into Customer Experience Management

Here's a great article by Barb Mosher over at cmswire.com where she presents the case for Adobe as a potential power-player in the customer experience management space. To read Barb's article, simply click here.

In my two decades working with Adobe technologies, this is the first time I'm seeing that company try to integrate the sundry business units into enterprise offerings. They have a great number of interesting pieces to the puzzle now, and at times it seemed like they almost accidentally fell into them.

For instance, the Day acquisition by the LiveCycle business unit brought the company the Communique product (Web content management system), Communique DAM (digital asset management system), and CRX (ECM-content repository). Now Adobe has a credible approach to offering integrated workflows from the creative process through to management and delivery of content.

To top it off, Adobe's analytics business unit (in the form of Omniture and related products) can help organizations with business intelligence around analyzing patterns of content consumption.

I'll also point out that Adobe has something many of the other ECM/'CXM' vendors do not have -- namely reach into content authoring. The creative suite is still one of the most powerful ways for content authors and editors to collaborate without having to painstakingly tag content with raw code. That, along with the company's server side versions of products like InDesign, Photoshop and Illustrator, a few new consumer products like Edge and Muse, and the companies play into content delivery to tablet via the Adobe Digital Publishing Suite, leaves the impression that once Adobe figures out how to REALLY integrate all these technologies in business units, the company will be a daunting force to be reckoned with by the other ECM vendors.

It seems to me that while Adobe is figuring out how to integrate all of these products, the company might consider making a play for some linguistics technology. Autonomy has IDOL, SaaS acquired Teragram, and Opentext recently acquired NStein's TME in 2010. There are only a few remaining standalone text mining engine players out there (example is Temis' Luxid).

Whether or not Adobe now realizes that it is squarely in what so many are now calling the "customer experience management" space as Autonomy and Opentext are (and EMC to a lesser extent with Documentum, DCTM DAM, XDB, and related products), Adobe is going to need to integrate technology to help organizations semantically enrich content based upon predefined taxonomies of the customers' choosing.

Posted at 12:34 am by Joseph Bachana

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