Adobe sees ‘Experience Cloud’ as a $40-b opportunity

After its creative cloud, marketing cloud, and document cloud, Adobe is now betting big on its Experience Cloud, which it sees as a $40-billion opportunity.

“We see it as the largest growth opportunity for us,” Shantanu Narayen, CEO of $5.85-billion Adobe Systems, said at a select media briefing in Mumbai.

Adobe Experience Cloud will have its analytics cloud, marketing cloud, and a recently-launched advertising cloud bundled into it, and all of these will be powered by big data.

“We process 100 trillion transactions for customers annually and so are in some ways a big data company. Analytics is going to be the fabric of what drives customer experiences,” said Narayen.

Significantly, just a week ago tech giant Oracle launched its Content and Experience Cloud, a platform it said would help organisations manage and deliver content to any digital channel to initiate engagements with customers and employees. Adobe had launched its Experience Cloud a month earlier.

Clearly, the experience market is hotting up in a big way, and the race to own it has begun. Right now Adobe, which is clocking nearly $2 billion revenues from its marketing cloud, and has been evangelising the experience economy for a while at its mega customer events, has a head start.

As Narayen pointed out the automotive industry through the likes of Uber and the hospitality industry through the likes of Airbnb have already disrupted experiences. Now, it is the turn of other industries. “Every company can make experience their USP,” said Narayen.

In India, Adobe has already begun riding the experience wave, said Kulmeet Bawa, MD, South Asia of the company, pointing out how the likes of SpiceJet, Taj Hotels, Make My Trip, Airtel and Hotstar are investing in strong digital experiences.

“There is a strong market momentum and four of the top 5 internet retail brands, three of the top 4 telecom brands, 3 of the top 5 airline brands and 4 of the top 5 private banks are our customers,” said Bawa.

According to Bawa, Adobe sees a huge market for Experience Cloud opening up in India due to two factors.

One, because the government is unleashing transformational digital initiatives. Second, India is a young nation with a lot of “screenagers”, youth who consume multiple screens.

Going forward, Bawa said Adobe in India would focus on brick and mortar retail, since most physical retailers are now investing in digital in a big way, and also dive deeper into the banking space.

The backbone of the Experience Cloud, Narayen said, is Adobe Sensei, an Artificial Intelligence framework that it is now embedding in all its offering. The applications will be immense for its customers, he pointed out. For example, a fast food chain could group its opted-in users by location using Adobe Sensei’s machine learning and serve them customised promotions.

The San Jose-headquartered company has recently entered into a partnership with Microsoft that enables Adobe products to pull Microsoft data and insights (from CRM, Dynamic 365, Power BI etc) into Sensei for more intelligent machine learning. Soon Microsoft tools will have Sensei in them too.

“We have had a long history of partnership with Microsoft, especially with Pdf. This newest partnership will help enterprises digitally transform,” he said.

Narayen said in India Adobe could leverage its partnership with Microsoft in two ways.

“Microsoft is investing in data centres in India. Second, there is also a way to partner in R&D,” he said. Thirty per cent of Adobe’s research pool is in India, and would have an understanding of the Indian psyche, which would add value to the Sensei learning for this market.

Ask Narayen about whether Adobe’s cloud strategy is really working given that enterprises have been fairly slow in moving to the cloud, and he retorts, “If you compare cloud deployment cycles to adoption of desktop software, it is actually much faster. The real measure you have to look at is how fast it gets adopted. ”

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