LAS VEGAS—Adobe announced an expansion of its global partner program, adding major new partners and enhancing the Adobe Exchange program.
At its Adobe Summit 2016 event here, Adobe boasted that its partner ecosystem now includes more than 3,000 agencies, system integrators and technology partners, as well as hundreds of thousands of developers. Its Partner Day, held annually at the Adobe Summit, is now the company’s largest partner event of the year, said Abhay Parasnis, executive vice president and chief technology officer at Adobe.
To facilitate partner involvement in the Adobe ecosystem, the company expanded Adobe Exchange, its marketplace for add-ons and extensions. The program offers go-to-market services for third parties to integrate their technologies with Adobe Marketing Cloud, Creative Cloud and Document Cloud. It includes integrations with technologies such as Microsoft Dynamics CRM, DemandBase, Acxiom and Brightedge.
Updates to the Adobe Exchange include a new opt-in partner program that provides support for activities such as enablement, marketing and sales engagement. Adobe also introduced a new developer portal, adobe.io, which features a set of services developers can access across all three Adobe clouds. The developer portal provides access to APIs, developer documentation, and Adobe’s Creative and Mobile SDKs. Adobe also added a new user interface and notifications for Adobe Marketing Cloud to improve workflows and collaboration functionality.
And more than 250 technology partners now extend the functionality of Adobe’s digital marketing tools and showcase their solutions on Adobe Exchange, Parasnis said. Customers are now activating more than 1,000 new partner integrations with Adobe Marketing Cloud per quarter as they extend the reach of Adobe’s digital marketing solutions, he added.
Through the exchange, Adobe’s partners are delivering personalization and analytics solutions as well as e-commerce, social media and advertising systems, among other offerings.
“The growth of our partner ecosystem has been enormous,” Parasnis said in a statement. He noted that more than 950 partners attended Adobe’s Partner Day event this year, an increase of more than 40 percent over last year.
At Partner Day, Adobe also recognized its top partners for 2015. The winners were Accenture Interactive, 2015 Marketing Cloud Partner of the Year, Americas; Rosetta, a Razorfish company, 2015 Marketing Cloud Growth Partner of the Year; R2i, 2015 Marketing Cloud Mid-Market Partner of the Year, Americas; and Clicktale, 2015 Marketing Cloud Innovation Partner of the Year, Americas.
Speaking about Adobe’s moves at the summit, Chris Chodnicki, co-founder and executive director of strategic partnerships at R2i, a Baltimore-based full-service, independent marketing agency, said, “I think one of the most innovative new features Adobe announced today is the Adobe Marketing Cloud Device Co-op that will link devices across a shared network of large brands. The ability to leverage real-time data passed through the network and along with information about the consumer’s personal device is well beyond the levels of personalization being provided with many of today’s technologies.”
Adobe Enhances Partner Program, Lands Demandware, comScore Deals
In other partner news, Adobe and Demandware announced a strategic partnership to combine Adobe’s digital marketing and customer experience capabilities with the Demandware Commerce Cloud enterprise cloud commerce platform. The partnership is aimed at helping companies create richer, personalized experiences across all digital properties without relying heavily on IT resources, said Errol Denger, who leads Adobe’s commerce program.
“This is a classic example of two leaders in enterprise cloud technology coming together for the benefit for shared retailer customers,” said Tom Griffin, senior vice president of corporate development at Demandware, in a blog post. “This empowers retailers to improve user experiences by merging compelling, relevant, contextual commerce engagements, made possible by Demandware, with highly branded experiences that have traditionally not been transactional.”
Moreover, by integrating Adobe’s Marketing Cloud with the Demandware Commerce Cloud, marketers will be able to create and manage more engaging, personalized omnichannel shopping experiences, Denger said.
“Brands will be able to optimize and personalize these shopping experiences in real time by testing content and experiences based on customers’ behavioral data, purchase data and clickstream behavior,” he said in a blog post. “Products are brought to life with Demandware’s rich merchandising capabilities coupled with dynamic content and rich media, including zoom-and-pan product images, 360-degree spin, and shoppable videos. Together Adobe and Demandware are helping brands streamline the delivery of branded and personalized shopping experiences with dynamic content across any device, as well as measure the effectiveness of their commerce program.”
In another partner move at the summit, Adobe and comScore announced a strategic partnership to provide new insights into digital media consumption. This new partnership will provide cross-device audience measurement of video and ad content so companies can better plan for media placement and other activities.
Through this partnership, comScore and Adobe will measure digital video content and ads on a variety of platforms, including TV, video on demand, smartphones, tablets, game consoles and over-the-top connected devices. This is exactly the kind of thing media companies, publishers, multichannel video programming distributors (MVPDs) and advertisers have been looking for—a way to get better, reliable metrics on media consumption.
“Digital platforms are a key growth opportunity over the next decade and are already driving meaningful viewership for our services, including CBS All Access and CBSN,” said Marc DeBevoise, executive vice president and general manager of CBS Digital Media at CBS Interactive, in a statement. “This partnership between comScore and Adobe gets the industry one step closer to unified cross-platform measurement, further validating the value of our audiences across screens and giving our advertisers the ability to deliver data-enhanced campaigns across devices.”
“We need to be able to show advertisers where our engaged multiscreen audiences are consuming content in order to effectively monetize our premium content everywhere,” said Greg Dinsmore, director of Digital Insights and Cross-Platform Measurement at Rogers Communications, also in a statement.