Adobe Launches New Web Experience Management Suite

In one of the biggest enterprise announcements Adobe Systems has made to date, the company introduced its new Web Experience Management suite, which merges Adobe enterprise technologies with recently acquired Day Software and Omniture solutions.

Adobe’s new WEM suite is a unified Web 2.0 content-management suite that combines optimized mobile experiences, integrated Web analytics, social-media collaboration, digital-asset management and campaign management, Rob Pinkerton, senior director of product marketing at Adobe, told eWEEK.

Moreover, the company’s entrance in the WEM market marks another important milestone in Adobe’s vision of delivering customer-centric solutions across organizations, Pinkerton said. The new WEM suite will help IT professionals and developers optimize digital channels to acquire new customers, gain customer insight and deliver personalized experiences across devices—leading to better conversion rates and a superior brand experience, he said. Marketers can deliver localized and relevant content for targeted multi-channel campaigns.

“Marketing is kind of the last great business function in the enterprise to be automated,” Pinkerton told eWEEK.

“The pressure is high for businesses to become more social, personalized and interactive while maintaining greater revenue at a lower cost,” Rob Tarkoff, senior vice president and general manager of Digital Enterprise Solutions at Adobe, said in a statement. “This careful balancing act of effectiveness, improved customer experiences and multi-channel optimization can only be achieved through an end-to-end Web experience management solution. CQ5 from Adobe, combined with the capabilities of Adobe Online Marketing Suite, gives business leaders unrivaled intelligence and agility to bolster their company brand and incite greater customer loyalty.”

Indeed, Adobe’s new WEM solution represents a big step toward delivering a CEM (Customer Experience Management) platform that powers immersive, multi-channel experiences, transforming how enterprises engage, sell and service their customers. The WEM solution incorporates product enhancements to CQ5 from Adobe, including new modules for mobile and marketing campaign management as well as new integration with Adobe Online Marketing Suite.

Adobe gained control of the CQ5 technology when the company acquired Day Software in October 2010. CQ5 is a suite of content-management tools including WCM (Web content management), mobile, social collaboration, MCM (marketing campaign management) and DAM (digital asset management) applications. CQ5 adds the capabilities of Online Marketing Suite, allowing businesses to deliver more targeted content to identified segments and transform a Website from a general communications platform into a focused vehicle for lead generation and revenue acceleration.

 “With the dramatic growth of smartphones, tablets and other connected devices, and the huge adoption of social networks, online marketers must be able to engage their customers across very diverse channels, including Web, mobile and social. Marketers need an integrated platform that lets them create and deliver a compelling and relevant experience—one that's tailored to the particular customer in the context of their interaction,” Melissa Webster, program vice president for Content & Digital Media Technologies at IDC, said in a statement. “IDC believes it will be critical for customer experience vendors to provide an integrated suite of tools that is designed to deliver specific content to specific customers in context—at any time, on any device—and that provides actionable insight to help marketers optimize that content.”

New CQ5 modules in the new solution include CQ5 Mobile, which extends the capabilities of CQ5 WCM and lets businesses easily customize and repurpose existing content for optimal display across screens and devices. In addition to Web-application development, CQ5 Mobile enables marketers to edit content for native applications. With this module, businesses can integrate mobile into multichannel marketing efforts, reduce costs, connect with “on-the-go” customers and increase revenue, Pinkerton said.

Another new module is the CQ5 Marketing Campaign Management, which is a marketing automation system that enables marketers to plan and roll out multi-channel marketing campaigns by orchestrating campaigns across Web, mobile, mobile applications, social communities, social media and more.

Meanwhile, Adobe’s new WEM solution also features enhancements to existing CQ5 modules, including CQ5 Social Collaboration, which provides online marketers with new tools to build media-rich, interactive online communities that increase site repeat visits, build customer brand identification and loyalty, and facilitate greater customer insight for continuous optimization of new campaigns. With a new Forums capability, users can also exchange and connect information within and beyond the organization to employees, vendors, customers, prospects and other stakeholders.

Adobe also updated the CQ Targeting module, which is a unification of CQ5 and the Online Marketing Suite and empowers organizations to gain real-time marketing agility to drive higher rates of customer acquisition and return on campaign spend.

Moreover, the new solution, which features pre-built integration with Adobe SiteCatalyst, powered by Omniture, enables digital marketers to measure and analyze customer interactions across channels for real-time updates to targeting rules to drive greater relevancy and brand engagement for outbound marketing efforts.

Adobe’s new WEM solution also comes with built-in integration with Adobe Test&Target, powered by Omniture, which allows digital marketers to analyze customer interactions and behavioral observations across channels to boost online conversion rates and drive increases in sales pipeline and company revenue.

Hal Danziger, chief technology officer at Adobe customer New York Media, said, “As consumers use an increasing variety of devices, platforms and channels to access mobile content, it becomes more challenging to deliver a consistently high-quality experience for every user. The rollout of CQ5 from Adobe will make it much easier to create and maintain mobile Web presences and applications that reflect the full richness of our Website, with an optimized mobile experience, no matter how readers choose to access our content. In this way, we can help meet the needs and preferences of every reader and leverage our strong customer relationships to compete against other media companies across all platforms.”

“Most of our clients, CMOs and technology organizations inside Global 1000 brands, have already invested in their Web, social, mobile and campaign infrastructures, and face a real challenge today maintaining consistency across all these different customer touch-points,” Andy Peebler, senior vice president of the Acquity Group, said in a statement. “Historically, maintaining that consistency has meant a lot of systems integration work to focus on the plumbing of customer experience management versus the time spent understanding customer needs and developing actual content and campaigns. Adobe’s new CQ5 release will allow us as an agency to spend less time on the plumbing and more time listening to customer needs and developing compelling user experiences and campaigns to optimize our clients’ relationships with their customers.”

And, for his part, Dan Barnicle, vice president of content management and collaboration at SapientNitro, another Adobe customer, said, “With the continued explosion of mobile devices and increased adoption of social media, marketers need to deliver campaigns that reach today’s savvy, on-the-go consumer in a way that is both authentic and adaptable. SapientNitro and Adobe share a vision for providing marketers, businesses and IT professionals with the tools for delivering more collaborative and dynamic customer experiences to organizations across industries and devices. Today’s launch of CQ5 from Adobe raises the bar on Customer Experience Management for deploying optimized multi-channel campaigns across mobile and social collaboration platforms.”