Adobe Named the Only Leader in Forrester Wave Report on Digital Intelligence Platforms

Earlier today, we announced that The Forrester Wave™: Digital Intelligence Platforms, Q2 2017 has recognized Adobe as the only vendor whose current offering, strategy, and market presence scored high enough across 26 evaluation criteria to earn the title of “Leader.”

The Leader designation is a familiar position for Adobe. Adobe pioneered the Marketing Cloud category and has had an uninterrupted tenure as a leader in this category since its inception. With the expansion of the roles and requirements placed on marketers, Adobe unveiled Adobe Experience Cloud, a comprehensive set of cloud services designed to give enterprises everything they need to deliver exceptional customer experiences.

Core to any solution that’s designed to facilitate the creation, delivery, and optimization of personalized experiences is a purpose-built platform — capable of aggregating, interpreting, and acting on digital intelligence. Adobe Experience Cloud — running on the Adobe Experience Platform — excels in this space. Emerging as the leader among digital intelligence platform vendors in this latest report underscores Adobe’s leadership position when it comes to helping brands deliver exceptional and personalized customer experiences at massive scale.

What Is a Digital Intelligence Platform?
According to this latest Forrester report, companies are pushing for digital intelligence platforms to help them “unify the understanding of customer digital interactions and to deliver consistent, continually improving experiences” — requirements that have long been the goals of digital marketing. Today, every division within a company needs this holistic view of the customer as well as the ability to act on any insights provided.

Forrester clarifies that “the habit of piecemeal purchasing of digital analytics and optimization technologies in isolation for use by different teams (e.g., marketing, product management, and customer support) stymies attempts to track and keep up with the customer at scale across all digital touchpoints. Enterprises and their vendors are now starting the move toward consolidated technology platforms.”

The Key Pillars of a Digital Intelligence Platform
The Forrester digital intelligence architecture comprises the following 15 technological capabilities across these three pillars:

  1. Digital Data-Management Technologies — data warehousing and tag management;
  2. Digital Analytics-Management Technologies — application analytics, cross-channel attribution, digital performance management, interaction analytics, Internet of Things (IoT) analytics, predictive analytics, social analytics, spatial analytics, voice-of-the-customer, and web analytics; and
  3. Digital Engagement-Optimization Technologies — behavioral targeting, online testing, and recommendations.

How Did Adobe Earn Forrester’s Leader Designation?
In this evaluation of digital intelligence platform vendors, vendors were given a series of scores based on their abilities to integrate and deliver customer value across 26 evaluation criteria. Ultimately, these scores graded the strengths of their current offerings, the strengths of their strategies, and their market presences.

In the end, Adobe emerged with the highest scores for both current offering and strategy and tied for the highest score for market presence. In fact, Adobe received the highest scores possible in nine categories, including cross-channel attribution, social analytics, web analytics, behavioral targeting, online testing, tag management, partner ecosystem, digital intelligence revenue, and number of enterprise customers — a testament, we believe, to the robust digital intelligence capabilities that Adobe Experience Cloud solutions provide.

Here’s what Forrester had to say about Adobe specifically:

Adobe continues to have strength and depth in digital intelligence, primarily for optimizing customer experiences and engagement, all within the framework of its marketing cloud platform in a marketing and eCommerce context. … Looking forward, the vendor aims to continue to entice and extend its customer base through partnerships with Microsoft Azure (to strengthen its appeal to enterprise sales teams) and Adobe Sensei (to focus its AI efforts on scaling customer experiences).

In Sum
We’re thrilled to receive this recognition and see it as further validation of our strategy — to enable our customers to become experience businesses with the help of Adobe Experience Cloud and the Adobe Experience Platform. Adobe has long maintained that data without intelligence is merely history — but, data with intelligence is the fuel that drives excellent customer experiences.

Download Forrester’s full report, “The Forrester Wave™: Digital Intelligence Platforms, Q2 2017, from our website.