How Adobe Was Named as a Leader in Forrester’s Latest Wave on Digital Experience Platforms

Delivering relevant and exceptional customer experiences in real time is a necessity for enterprises competing to win B2B and B2C customers alike. Leading market research firms have started to track the development and progress of technologies that make those experiences a reality. According to The Forrester Wave™: Digital Experience Platforms, Q3 2019, Adobe is a leader among the 10 most significant providers.

In recognizing Adobe as a leader, Forrester evaluated several of Adobe’s capabilities, including the Adobe Experience Platform which facilitates real-time actioning on enterprise behavioral and transactional customer data, in use cases ranging from sales to support to marketing and beyond.

“Adobe stands out in experience management and platform services”

Customer experiences must be built on an understanding of the entire customer journey. At Adobe, we believe the days of relying solely on CRM data for customer intelligence are long gone. Adobe Experience Platform aggregates data from all touchpoints – not just when customers purchase, but at every interaction, whether on a mobile device or computer, whether they log in or are interacting anonymously, and whether they interact with marketing, sales or support. This comprehensive view of the customer is critical to delivering personalized experiences where and when the transaction is happening – what Adobe refers to as the “edge”.

Delivering the right experience

Content is another part of what defines a good or bad customer experience. Luckily, content management is part of Adobe’s DNA. Adobe Experience Manager has long been a recognized leader in web content management, helping enterprises quickly and easily design the right content experiences and deliver them across channels.

Delivering in real time

The challenge of developing a holistic customer view isn’t in having enough data or the right data. It’s in associating data in different formats stored in different systems that weren’t designed to “talk” to each other. Many enterprises know that in order to build great customer experiences, they need to harness the power of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). But, in order to do that, they must stitch data together to gain a better understanding of the customer.

In Adobe Experience Platform, enterprise and third-party data can be transformed using the Experience Data Model (XDM) into a format easily sharable for all and consumable by Sensei, Adobe’s AI and ML framework. Experience Platform stitches together data-in-motion and data-at-rest to develop a unified customer profile, actionable in real time. Finally, Adobe Experience Platform also powers a real-time Customer Data Platform, helping brands simplify the management of known and unknown profiles to understand and connect with customers, and activate segments in real-time.

Platform services turn technology teams into creatives

According to Forrester, “Platform services act as a force multiplier to accelerate operational agility,” (The Forrester Wave™: Digital Experience Platforms, Q3 2019). Platform services are common services for content, customer data and transactions combined with AI and ML. These services provide the insights needed by practitioners to design friction-free customer experiences that engage and delight.

Until now, the process for getting from data to insights to action has been lengthy, requiring complex technology and the expertise of data scientists. By streamlining data management and providing curated data on the entire customer experience, Adobe Experience Platform puts the power to derive deep insights into the hands of teams throughout the enterprise. With this, the enterprise’s IT team, its application developers and data scientists all become part of the creative journey, gleaning insights and building applications that empower their internal customers to facilitate real-time customer experiences.

A platform anchored on security

The Forrester Wave report found that “Digital experience platform vendors are responding to the requirements of scale, security and operational support with more and better infrastructure services, including cloud and hybrid cloud support,” (The Forrester Wave™: Digital Experience Platforms, Q3 2019).

Adobe Experience Platform was built with security in mind and a robust, powerful data governance framework that enterprises can use to manage the myriad regulatory, contractual, and policy limitations inherent within the digital data environment. This framework allows enterprises to make their data securely accessible in Adobe Experience Cloud to front-end teams where they can take advantage of all of Adobe’s best-in-class solutions for marketing, analytics, advertising, and commerce, to deliver amazing customer experiences.

Adobe Experience Cloud vision – providing digital transformation for enterprises on the leading edge

Almost two-thirds (65%) of businesses have identified the need to improve the customer experience as the top driver for digital transformation. There are a number of DXP providers now developing solutions in response to this need. Yet, according to the Forrester Wave report, “Legacy investments, limited budgets, business disruption, and fear of vendor lock-in lead most organizations to avoid going all-in on a single vendor’s DX platform,” which we believe limits their ability to explore other options as their business needs change.

Adobe Experience Platform provides a unique solution that addresses these concerns. With Experience Platform, enterprises are not slaves to the platform. On the contrary – it allows enterprises to build their own systems leveraging different components of their existing infrastructure to capitalize on Experience Platform’s ability to stitch together data from disparate sources to provide insights that are actionable in real time.

Adobe Experience Platform also offers scalability with a wide variety of supporting products and services, which provide a set of “building blocks” that enterprises can implement to extend their capabilities as budgets allow and on a timeline that minimizes disruption.

Whether you invest in Adobe products or bring your own to the table, Adobe Experience Platform can help your enterprise gain and keep a leading competitive edge in delivering relevant customer experiences in real time.

A singular focus on customer experience management (CXM) is Adobe’s secret code. We see that customer requirements are evolving quickly, and we’re trying to proactively and holistically address current and future needs — not just reacting to the market but driving it. The Forrester report showed Adobe having the top scores possible in both the vision and execution roadmap criteria, which we consider to be a differentiating strength for DX Platforms.

At Adobe, customer experience management is not just a side business – it’s baked into everything we do. And it’s our focus on this vision that will set the pace for enterprises racing to provide the best customer experiences.

See why Forrester named Adobe a Leader in DXPs. Download the full report, The Forrester Wave™: Digital Experience Platforms, Q3 2019 to learn more.