We attended Adobe Summit 2016 last week! The conference moved from cold and snowy Salt Lake City to the sunny desert of Las Vegas this year. With around 10.000 attendees, this was the biggest Adobe Summit ever.
In the General Sessions, it was interesting to see how Adobe is positioning the company and their solutions. Adobe is focusing in three key areas: Digital Media, Digital Documents and Digital Marketing. For each area, Adobe is providing a dedicated cloud solution: Adobe Creative Cloud for Digital Media, Adobe Document Cloud for Digital Documents and Adobe Marketing Cloud for Digital Marketing.
With these three cloud solutions, Adobe wants to be one key player in the next big wave which will disrupt the enterprises: The Experience Business Wave. After the big „Back Office Wave“ in the 1970s and 1980s implementing ERP solutions inside of organizations and changing how enterprise produce their products. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the second big wave changed how businesses viewed and interacted with their customers: The „Front Office Wave“ introduced CRM solutions inside organizations. For Adobe, the next big wave which transforms how business work is the so called „Experience Business Wave“.
Adobe describes the Experience Business Wave in the following way: Companies have to create a personalized, compelling customer experience at every link of the relationship, from websites and mobile apps to retail environments.
One of the big new features introduced during Adobe Summit was Cross-Device Co-op. This solution allows companies to market on people instead of devices. Therefore, the company has to share the device and people information with Adobe to identify the devices of certain people. Only if the companies is willing to share the information they can use this new feature. Based on the information of all participant companies, Adobe Marketing Cloud can identify the devices of an individual person which allows to target a person across devices with the same marketing message.
To use the full potential of the different Adobe Marketing Cloud solutions, Adobe has worked on a deeper integration between the different solutions. And to enhance Adobe Marketing Cloud, Adobe also build so called „cross-cloud integrations“ using the power of Creative Cloud and Document Cloud. For example using Adobe Document Cloud together with Adobe Experience Manager Forms or using the Adobe Stock for the Smart Tagging of images inside Adobe Experience Manager.
To get deeper insights on certain products of the Adobe Marketing Cloud, you have to choose sessions where Product Managers and/or members of the engineering team were presenting. Sessions presented by Product Marketing Manager ended to be sales presentations for customers or your sales stuff.
At Wednesday evening, the two traditional evening events Adobe Sneaks and Adobe Summit Bash had taken place. It was an amazing evening and really entertaining!
Overall, it was a great conference!
