Gartner’s Third Magic Quadrant for Digital Marketing Hubs Was Just Released. Guess Who’s a Leader (Again)?

For the third year, Gartner’s 2017 Magic Quadrant for Digital Marketing Hubs report has positioned Adobe as a Leader. The Gartner report continues Adobe’s excellence in the marketing cloud/hub/suite reports from major analysts. In fact, Adobe has never NOT been a leader in any major analyst’s marketing cloud report — you can even look it up in the actual report.

While it’s always nice to be recognized by very intelligent industry analysts, Adobe believes that what’s even more important than being leaders in the Gartner Magic Quadrant is that this emphatically validates Adobe’s Experience Business vision.

Gartner’s Magic Quadrant has an axis for “Completeness of Vision” and “Ability to Execute.” Here’s how Gartner defines those:

Adobe is highest and furthest to the right in both Ability to Execute and Completeness of Vision. So, what is Adobe’s vision?

The Experience Business
Being an experience business means leveraging data, content, and data science to deliver experiences that are relevant and personalized and to deliver them on any channel and to any customer. Adobe unifies data and content in an open and common platform to create the amazing customer experiences that build loyalty. Because, in a world where customers identify the experience with the brand, nothing else matters.

When we started in this business, we disrupted the market as well as ourselves. Throughout the last seven years, we have built a remarkable collection of marketing technology. We have transformed the industry while pioneering the digital-marketing category.

Today’s consumers identify all interactions and experiences with a brand as the brand. Adobe has become the de facto platform for all customer experiences and engagement in an enterprise. Adobe Marketing Cloud (AMC) is the central consumer-engagement platform that enables enterprises to develop consistent, continuous, and compelling consumer experiences.

Adobe creates the foundation of a brand’s experience fabric with a complete, extensible platform composed of comprehensive data and content systems. And, as marketing organizations become integral parts of enterprises’ broader initiatives to manage holistic consumer experiences, AMC enables organizations to create, manage, and deliver experiences across all consumer interactions — starting with traditional marketing touchpoints but extending to support, service, product, and sales.

Enterprises can’t become experience businesses with old technologies and methodologies. This is a modern engagement, requiring almost futuristic tools — a digital transformation. Old platforms, freeware, haphazard profiles, or even enterprise tools that don’t interact or integrate are holding marketers back and creating clunky, disjointed experiences. To get this right means re-platforming and creating a modern digital-marketing foundation that provides seamless integration, holistic customer views, and a delivery mechanism so smooth customers hardly notice it.

The Adobe Experience Platform
All of this starts with and is realized through the Adobe Experience Platform (AEP, or The Platform). Unlike many vendors, who package and market their jumbled toolboxes of disjointed acquisition sprees as clouds and platforms, Adobe puts platform at the center. We are putting our money and resources where our vision is — in the platform.

The Platform ensures that all our applications (solutions/clouds) are increasingly intelligent and able to instantaneously apply insight derived from integrated and unique data assets to the many channels where consumers interact and engage with brands. With the Platform at the center, our solutions become agile integrated applications that make the experience business a reality by providing companies with a new level of actionable intelligence natively connected to real-time delivery.

With Adobe Experience Platform, companies accelerate their abilities to function as experience businesses. These companies can now centralize and standardize customer data and content from any system, creating powerfully cohesive and actionable insights and profiles. Applying The Platform’s data-science framework to these data and content assets dramatically improves the design, personalization, and delivery of rich customer experiences. The Platform not only includes services for blending and analyzing data, but also harnesses machine learning via Adobe Sensei to both amplify marketing abilities and efficiency.

Via application programming interfaces (APIs), The Platform also makes its data, content, and insights available to partners and third-party applications for them to consider and act upon in real-time; thus, driving consistent, continuous, and compelling experiences in the most-relevant moments — regardless of the tool or service.

The Future of Adobe Experience Platform
We are driving toward new horizons of opportunity. We want to enable our customers to do not only the things they do now (only better), but also new, exciting — and even sometimes unforeseen — things that will delight their customers at every turn. We are committed to major innovation, and the best and quickest way to innovate and disrupt the industry and maintain our competitive advantage is to first establish and innovate on the Adobe Experience Platform, which will enable faster and more-disruptive innovation in the solutions.

Industry recognition for leadership feels great — we don’t deny it. But, we aren’t in this business for the accolades, but rather to realize our vision of helping companies accelerate their abilities to become experience businesses. It’s who we are and what we do — and, we expect to be doing it for a long time to come.

Gartner Magic Quadrant for Digital Marketing Hubs, Andrew Frank, Christi Eubanks, Lizzy Foo Kune, Martin Kihn, Jake Sorofman, 14 February 2017.

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