The modern enterprise platform: making real-time a reality

Every organization, regardless of industry, has reoriented their strategy to prioritize customer experience. It was already cliché to say digital transformation was a C-level agenda, but now the urgency has increased with COVID-19; brands will simply not go back to business the way it was before.

Most enterprises have focused on digitizing the front end of the customer journey to connect with consumers through meaningful moments. While there has been monumental progress as it relates to the customer experience, CIOs still struggle with the backend of an organization’s digital transformation. To solve for that challenge, last year we introduced Adobe Experience Platform, the industry’s first open and extensible platform that allows brands to stitch together their data across the enterprise, enabling enterprises to deliver impactful digital experiences in real time. Today, we’re announcing new capabilities that empower brands to lead with a data-driven operating model and enable its business and product teams to best leverage their data assets and drive insights – faster than ever before.

The customer drives everything, including timing. Customers today expect timely and relevant interactions with every brand or will jump ship. While many technology providers claim to offer tools that empower real-time customer engagement, the reality is that until now, real-time equated to (near) real-time customer experience.

Gaining real-time efficiency

Brands simply aren’t making the most of their use of marketing tools today due to a multitude of technologies across business lines to solve for disparate problems. Each separate product has their own legacy data collection SDKs, their own domains and their own edge servers and services – creating a cumbersome and complex data maze that CIOs struggle to find a clear path in.

With Adobe Experience Platform Edge Network and Web/Mobile SDK, brands can consolidate the strategy into a single implementation that works across products, ultimately streamlining and accelerating data transfers to and from edge servers with one Edge Network and one SDK for all Adobe Experience Cloud apps. With a solution-agnostic data gateway that gives brands the option to not only send multiple requests, but also receive requests from multiple servers in one response, brands will see decreases costs, easier integrations and real-time impact with customers.

This is a critical step that gives brands who leverage other applications in conjunction with Adobe Experience Platform, to deploy one SDK on their website and greatly improve performance. By reducing the amount of code on each page by up to 80%, customers found that page load time was dramatically faster.

Modernized data collection

One of the greatest challenges to delivering real-time experiences has been the complexity of data collection at scale. Through Adobe Experience Platform Launch Server Side, customers can leverage Adobe’s new Web and Mobile SDKs and world-wide data collection network to stream event-level data to first-or third-party destinations in seconds.

Brands will see increased site performance with simplified data collection, faster sites and apps, by moving work previously done on the browser or mobile device to the server, this is the industry’s first platform to offer all of these capabilities integrated in one product. A retailer will be able to leverage real-time behavioral data on Black Friday to instantly deliver tailored promotions, capitalizing on a moment in time.

Simplifying access to data and activation

Adobe Experience Platform allows brands to bring together data across many disparate channels, such as web, point-of-sale and call centers. This view into each customer helps brands create compelling, personalized experiences, but for many, it’s still a challenge to make sense of how this data is stored, and how to take action on that data.

Adobe is previewing Project Segment Scout in Adobe Experience Platform to address this challenge. Through an experimental, natural language-based interface, anyone, regardless of technical expertise, can build powerful customer segments, and mine that data in the right way to move forward. For example, a retail marketer could simply ask Adobe Experience Platform to search for “women in New York who have added shoes to a cart and picked it up in store” and this feature will automatically analyze the request, mine the brand’s data and share a group of customers for the brand to engage with.

Project Segment Scout is part of Sneaks, Adobe’s once a year innovation engine. Once a year, any Adobe employee has a chance to put forth new and innovative projects that evolve the way brands engage consumers digitally.

Adobe’s Real-Time Customer Data Platform, a service built on Adobe Experience Platform, recently won Adweek’s reader choice award for best Customer Data Platform.

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We also know many people are still impacted by the current COVID-19 crisis and our thoughts are with you. The entire Adobe team wants to thank you, our customers, and all creators around the world for the work you do to keep us inspired during this difficult time.