Adobe Systems Inc. is offering a new platform to consolidate its creative solutions and allow enterprises to manage and deliver their digital content across various channels from one place, aiming to make life easier for both IT departments and marketing creatives.
Officially announced this week, the Adobe Digital Enterprise Platform (ADEP) brings together various solutions in a single place. The new platform allows users to create and manage content using Adobe AIR, Flash Player, and Adobe Reader, along with marketing tools like Adobe’s Online Marketing Suite. Adobe’s 2009 acquisition of Omniture’s Web analytics technology is the base of the Adobe Online Marketing Suite, said Rob Pinkerton, Adobe’s senior director of product marketing for customer experience management (CEM).
About 18 months ago, Adobe announced its intention to invest more heavily in research and development, Pinkerton said. Much of that emphasis went toward what the company calls customer experience management (CEM), or the ability to deliver easy-to-use, well-designed digital content. “We believe this is a distinctive and emerging category of software,” Pinkerton said.
“We are continuing to executive on a vision we set our last year for customer experience management as a market,” Pinkerton said. Adobe’s new platform includes several new solutions, or templates, to manage certain marketing tasks. The new CEM solutions include, among others, Web Experience Management for Web and mobile content; Selection and Enrolment to allow for workflow automation; and Integrated Content Review, or what Pinkerton calls a magic button for digital asset management.
The platform’s goal is to enable IT departments not to have to go back constantly any time they want to make a change to an application, he said. “We’re trying to help IT and marketing solve some very complex problems,” he said and used retail and media and entertainment as examples of target sectors. “Marketing wants constant change,” he said. “IT wants to resist change, they want to control change.”
The platform is designed to give IT the ability to help users and engage with customers, according to Pinkerton. “They are rock stars, they are thinkers; you do not want your creatives trying to figure out how to do metatags,” he said. It also includes updated Flash Builder and Flex 4.5 tools. Developers can build a mobile application using the tools and deploy it across various devices without recoding, including the BlackBerry PlayBook and iOS devices.
The ADEP, Integrated Content Review solution, Web Experience Management solution will be available August 2011, with the other offerings available immediately in beta and expecting general release this fall. The new offerings highlighted at thefirst Adobe Digital Enterprise Summit, this October in Los Angeles.
