Adobe Marketing Cloud Leads the Pack in Forrester’s New Report

The recently released Forrester Wave(TM): Enterprise Marketing Software Suites (EMSS) report drilled down on the premier solutions, with Adobe Marketing Cloud leaping ahead of the competition. The category—enterprise marketing software—is a fast-growing, ever-changing landscape, with a growing listing of options in just the last few years and even months. But, from where I sit, it’s not about being the behemoth; instead, it’s become more and more about comprehensive “end-to-end integration,” broad-reaching access and capabilities, and a real simplification. Who has time to learn another set of skills, metrics, approaches, and techniques? Or, more so, a number of different platforms—this solution for this piece of the business, that solution for that piece. I certainly don’t, and my clients don’t either.

Back to the side-by-sides. For this report, Forrester evaluated eight different solutions from eight providers—Adobe, IBM, Marketo, Oracle, salesforce.com, SAP, SAS Institute, and Teradata—assessing each for the following strengths and weaknesses across 46 criteria within three core areas of consideration:

The final assessment, overall? The marketplace is “dynamic and early in its evolution,” but Adobe Marketing Cloud “distanced itself from the pack with a combination of an innovative, detailed vision and in-market functionality designed solely to provide marketers with clear incentive to use multiple solutions,” within the platform. In these three evaluation buckets, Adobe dominated, landing in the number one spot for current offerings, strategy, and market presence. Ultimately, Adobe outscored the competition in 11 of 14 categories, and earned a perfect five-out-of-five in EMSS prerequisites, application usability, partnership strategy, customer satisfaction, and financials—the only perfect scores tallied.

And it’s no surprise why. As the Forrester report noted, the company has set itself apart with Adobe Marketing Cloud’s core services, which enable the platform to integrate six individual brand products for one comprehensive experience. From this innovative jumping off point, “The product road map and overall vision for the EMSS build on that success,” with Adobe planted firmly as a strong, engaged strategic partner for its customers.

Call me biased, but I couldn’t agree more. The core services and the investment we’ve made in both development and acquisitions is why Adobe Marketing Cloud is, now, an undisputed industry leader, with a reputation for what matters most: reach, access, capabilities, innovation, ease of use and integration, customer service, and clear-cut value for those customers, paired with a meaningful investment in strategy and future endeavors. We’re great—but we’re only going to get better. The six main solutions in Marketing Cloud—Analytics, Target, Experience Manager, Social, Media Optimizer, and Campaign—are revolutionary on their own, but under the Adobe Marketing Cloud umbrella, and as part of a platform, they’re even better. Marketers can, with this unified solution, fully optimize the consumer life cycle from attracting and acquiring new customers to engaging and converting them in the brand to reporting and analyzing to further feed those relevant experiences.

It’s pretty powerful, but we’re not even done yet. Then, as Forrester noted, Adobe layers on core services. Now Adobe Marketing Cloud is unstoppable. Marketers are connecting with consumers across all platforms, delivering compelling journeys to those individuals and segments with profiles and audiences. Everyone’s in-step from a creative assets perspective—and reaping the benefits of greater efficiency—with the assets core service and digital asset repository. Brands can effortlessly tap into dynamic tag management with the activation service, gaining actionability and enabling them to optimize on the fly based on real-time behaviors and rules-driven executions. There’s plenty more in the collaboration, user management, exchange, and, of course, mobile core services.

This inaugural report is something all marketers should be diving into. If you’re trying to gain greater return on investment (ROI) and deliver better, more relevant cross-channel experiences for your audience—and, face it, who isn’t?—then this is a report worth reading. It’s a true analysis of what every marketer does best, and what everyone wants to do even more of: Deliver the best experiences at scale for every customer and customer segment, in every possible way. And that’s what we at Adobe want, too, and what we’re being recognized for in this report.

This prominent leadership position is something Adobe and the Adobe Marketing Cloud team, specifically, have worked toward over the last five-plus years, when we first began the process of building out the “data” side of “creativity + data,” with the Omniture acquisition in 2009. We knew, even then, that having technology that exclusively operated in silos wasn’t going to work, but, instead, a comprehensive, cross-channel marketing platform was the only thing that, ultimately, would do the trick—our customers needed to meet the skyrocketing demands their audiences already had, even five years ago. And we knew we at Adobe had to be the ones who helped them be everywhere for everyone, all of the time, even as the digital landscape evolved and grew. We made the gamble five years ago, and with this inaugural report we’re validated by our customers and the industry as a whole. That’s a good feeling.