Market Perspectives

We are happy to share some insights about Adobe drawn from our latest Value Index research, the 2023 Ventana Research Value Index: Customer Experience Management, which assesses how well vendors’ offerings meet buyers’ requirements.

In all of our Value Indexes, we utilize a structured research methodology built on evaluation categories designed to reflect real-world criteria and derived from RFP responses and a vendor selection process for analytics and business intelligence. We evaluated Adobe and 21 other vendors in seven categories, five relevant to the product — Adaptability, Capability, Manageability, Reliability and Usability — and two related to the vendor — TCO/ROI and Vendor Validation. To arrive at the Value Index rating for a given vendor, we weighted each category to reflect its relative importance in an RFP process, with the weightings based on our experience and on data derived from our Benchmark Research on Customer Experience (CX).

Adobe is a worldwide provider of cloud-based services, known for its Adobe Creative Cloud and a portfolio of marketing and commerce applications. Adobe was categorized as an Exemplary Vendor, ranking sixth overall in this Value Index evaluation. Adobe performed best in Vendor Validation and TCO/ROI, placing third in both. Adobe was a Value Index Leader in the categories of TCO/ROI and Vendor Validation and the Leader in Customer Experience.

Its product, Adobe Experience Cloud, is a portfolio that incorporates applications for journey management, marketing workflow, data management and analytics (including a customer data platform, or CDP), and specific tools for commerce, audience creation and segmentation. It is built atop the Adobe Experience Platform, which controls services needed across the suite for data ingestion, artificial intelligence (AI), identity resolution and privacy/governance.

Adobe’s portfolio meets customer experience management (CXM or CEM) requirements and its depth of focus on marketing. It partners with Genesys (among others) to manage interaction handling and has a robust set of commerce applications to add to the mix (though Adobe Commerce tools were not part of this evaluation). On the Product Experience side, Adobe ranked seventh, doing well in Adaptability (sixth place) and Capability (fourth place).

Its Reliability ranking could improve in performance, specifically in managing across users, data stores and instances and providing metrics and notifications for performance-related issues. Adobe’s Capability ranking would be better with more attention to areas somewhat outside its core area, particularly how it manages processes related to the customer service experience, including field service and case management.

This assessment was based on Adobe’s CXM products available in August of 2022. In releases subsequent to this evaluation, Adobe enhanced several of its CX analytics and data components and updated how its Experience Manager handles forms and assets.

Adobe, like all vendors in this space, should continue working towards a holistic, integrated CX platform that addresses the needs of users across the enterprise. Connecting workflows from marketing, sales and service teams should be a key priority.

This research-based index is the most comprehensive assessment of the value of CXM software in the industry. Technology buyers can learn more about how to use our Value Index by clicking here and included vendors that wish to learn more can click here. Read the report here.