Adobe’s Marketing Cloud is a powerhouse, but what’s next? New predictive capabilities and a SAP partnership hint on the future.

Adobe’s Marketing Cloud is a $1 billion business hiding inside a $4 billion company better known to many because the maker or Photoshop and Acrobat software. With the company’s marketing technology now drawing intense interest among big enterprises, the question is: How can Adobe bring its Marketing Cloud to the subsequent level?

This week’s Adobe Marketing Summit highlighted the company’s success, drawing greater than 6,500 customers and partners to Salt Lake City to listen to about new features, new technologies, and new alliances. Adobe’s cloud suite components include services for web analytics, ad-buy optimization, social network monitoring and participation, cross-channel campaign management, and content and community management.

We’ll get to the long list of latest features below, but attending to a better level is more closely tied to the recent technology and alliances aimed toward raising Adobe’s profile within the enterprise. That’s where Adobe faces (or will face) competition from the likes of IBM, Oracle, SAS, Teradata, and Salesforce.com, companies which have been diving more deeply into marketing.

[Want more at the marketing arms race? Read SAP Buys Hybris, Gains Customer Experience Power.]

The key new technology is predictive analytics, introduced this week as a preview of recent Marketing Mix Planning capabilities. Prediction is a sweet spot for SAS and IBM primarily, and it is the difference between rear-view-mirror reporting and, at best, trend analysis, versus forward-looking insight into what’s going to happen. The predictive focus of selling Mix Planning is on marketing optimization.

“This technology could be utilized by VPs of selling and CMO-level execs seeking to optimize advertising spend across both online and offline channels,” said Ray Pun, an Adobe senior product marketing manager, in a phone interview with InformationWeek. Offline ad spending includes TV, print, and radio, while online covers search keywords, display, email, and other digital channels.

The idea is to see the channels driving the proper return on investment by customer segment. “Historically we’ve been more concerned about analysis of online ad spend, but bringing it offline is a brand new area of focus,” said Pun.

If VPs and CMOs are the intended users of the promoting Mix app, the deep math should be buried backstage, as these execs cannot be confused with deep data wonks. SAS and SPSS tools and applications are more routinely utilized by statisticians or, on the broadest level, by data-savvy business analysts who’re used to working with data. The fad in analytics is moving toward more intuitive and accessible tools with graphical user interfaces and visible data-analysis capabilities, a course followed by SAS with its Visual Analytics product.

On the alliances front, Adobe announced a reseller agreement with SAP by which the enterprise applications vendor will sell Adobe Marketing Cloud alongside its Hybris e-commerce platform. Acquired last year, Hybris brought SAP into the e-commerce arena where IBM has WebSphere Commerce, Unica, Sterling Commerce, and DemandTec, while Oracle has ATG, Eloqua, recently acquired Responsys, and BlueKai.

Given SAP’s own aspirations — and its recent and relatively small e-commerce footprint with Hybris — Adobe’s partnership with SAP has its risks, in line with Wells Fargo securities analyst Jason Maynard. “More feet in the street selling Adobe Marketing Cloud may be an excellent thing within the near term; however, longer-term, if SAP believes a marketing cloud is significant to their customers, we expect it makes rather more sense for them to possess their future product direction,” Maynard wrote in a research note this week.

Adobe’s push into prediction and e-commerce are clearly tenuous, but it surely bolstered its existing strengths with a protracted list of upgrades to existing products. Adobe Marketing Cloud gained new core services, including a Master Marketing Profile that provides companies a single view in their customers. With this shared profile, users of diverse Marketing Cloud tools will know when and what campaigns customers received, whether by email, SMS, or a desktop or mobile impression. a brand new Shared Assets service ensures that creative materials are used cohesively and consistently across campaign channels, based on Adobe.

On the mobile front, Adobe introduced AdobePhoneGap Enterprise, an application development platform for building hybrid HTML5 apps for leading mobile platforms. While deep-pocketed companies are building native apps for iOS, Android, and Windows, many companies are struggling to search out the talent and fund mobile app-development teams.

“App development is moving in-house, and in case you have an internal team that has Web, HTML, and JavaScript skill sets and you’ve got every kind of content on your content-management system, why not leverage those skills to construct mobile apps?” reasoned Pun.

Adobe also added support for Apple’s iBeacon technology for Bluetooth-based measurement and targeting in stadiums and retail settings. Further, Adobe’s Campaign & Mobile Services 2.0 release announced this week supports push notifications for alerts along with news flashes, credit balances, flight updates, and other timely information.

Adobe can keep adding services to its Marketing Cloud and new capabilities for developers, but attending to the subsequent strategic level with enterprise customers will demand a broader play. Marketing Mix Planning and the SAP alliance are only a start.

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Doug Henschen is Executive Editor of InformationWeek, where he covers the intersection of enterprise applications with information management, business intelligence, big data and analytics. He previously served as editor in chief of Intelligent Enterprise, editor in chief of … View Full Bio

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