Adobe’s fiscal Q3 was relatively strong as the company reported $290 million in revenue for its Adobe Marketing Cloud portfolio of products, up from the $254.9 million recorded in Q3 last year. Adobe Systems’ total revenue was $1 billion in the quarter.
Overall, Adobe Marketing Cloud cited strong customer adoption in the third quarter, counting British Sky, Ford Motor Co., H&M, the US Department of Treasury and Adidas among key client wins.
“It really is in our best interest to manage and deliver the entire customer platform,” said Shantanu Narayen, Adobe Systems CEO, during the company’s Q3 earnings call.
Although he cited Adobe Campaign (formerly Neolane, the cross-channel campaign tool it bought about a year ago) and Adobe Experience Manager as key drivers for the overall marketing portfolio, “we’re seeing an increase in multiyear deployments as well as [selling] more solutions within existing customers,” which is leading to increased “stickiness” around the entire cloud portfolio.
Narayen said a combination of factors contributed to the traction this quarter, including an increase in size and volume of transactions, international expansion, growth in partner business, as well as a shift in perpetual to term-based contracts, which indicate larger, multiyear agreements.
“The way we look at [selling] this [line of business] is through new sales as well as the existing installed customer base…when you think about the number of large deals, that grew 40% year over year,” Narayen said. “People are standardizing on our platform.” In terms of what products customers adopt first, users tend to begin with AudienceManager, Adobe Analytics and Adobe Campaign and the upsells branch out from there.
Adobe fielded a number of investor inquiries about its positioning in the enterprise market, and whether or not the company has felt the heat from competing Marketing Cloud like Salesforce.com’s ExactTarget. Narayen said he feels Adobe Marketing Cloud is differentiated in both product and partner alliances.
For example, Adobe just days ago announced agency holding group Publicis would tap its data-management platform and initiate a re-platforming of tech across its umbrella of agencies. Narayen said he expects more agencies to follow suit.
Adobe also struck a “premier partnership” deal with software giant Wipro for digital marketing services; through the agreement, Wipro will develop marketing, commerce, analytics and customer experience solutions. This comes on the heels of Adobe’s deal with supply chain giant SAP to resell the Adobe Marketing Cloud. “Our value proposition is clearly resonating with marketers,” he said. “Interest in our solutions is high.”
