Seven Takeaways from Adobe Summit 2019
Adobe Summit this year felt very much like hosting a 100 people dinner party. You have to prepare so much in advance, make sure you have everything organized, make sure all the guests know where to go and what time to arrive, cook a ridiculous amount of food and when the party starts, it flies by and when it is all said and done – you crash on the couch trying to digest it all in before you have to get up and start cleaning. Ok – a bit dramatic but Summit is a big event for the Softcrylic team. It is our opportunity to showcase our brand, meet our clients, connect with old friends and learn what new tricks Adobe have in store for us. We prepare months in advance and we are on a mission.
This year we had a bigger team attending Summit and wanted to get more out of the experience so we divided and conquered. There was so many good announcements at Summit this year that we will be discussing in more detail in future posts but for now we wanted to highlight seven takeaways from Summit handpicked by the Softcrylic Team Members who attended Adobe Summit 2019 in Las Vegas, Nevada.
John Flavin
‘Leaning In’ on Partners – needed and wanted
At this year’s Adobe Summit, I was less interested in the big ticket items they were discussing around Marketo and Magento acquisitions. It was certainly fun to listen to and speculate upon the direction these acquisitions would take Adobe. However, it just seems too early to truly assess the strategy and the impact from our company’s perspective. Having said that, I felt exactly the same when the Microsoft / Adobe partnership was rolled out a few years back. This year, that partnership is starting to become significantly more clear in terms of the advantages to each organization as well as the strategic play in the marketplace and what it means to our company.
The area I was most interested in this year was how Adobe Partners are viewed in the future strategy. I was happy to hear a greater commitment to work with and collaborate with partners then in the past. One comment on Partner Day that resonated was that Adobe’s objective is to standup new clients with the initial implementation then to bring in partners to support the client that best meets the clients’ needs. We may have heard a statement like this in the past, however, it does seem that the strategic direction from a technology standpoint is going to necessitate a higher dependency on partners.
We did get a glimpse of that strategic direction with the discussion of Experience Platform and Adobe I/O. These initiatives will provide a marketing team a lot more flexibility while also potentially requiring more dependence on a partner (internal or external) with deep technical skills. These initiatives by Adobe also make a nod to the reality that not all clients have the Adobe stack top to bottom. We see this in our practice constantly. What they seem to be trying to do is allow the Adobe stack to better ‘play’ with other technologies. This philosophy also rang true in the Adobe Extension Idol competition (which we participated in) as the top selected winners allowed for better integrations outside of the Adobe stack.
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Francis Lavelle
The Open Data Initiative is ambitious, ballsy and might just work
Announced last fall and discussed in much more detail at the Adobe summit the Open Data Initiative is a plan to standardize and therefore unify data structures. This plan has been jointly developed by Adobe, Microsoft, and SAP and they are actively recruiting companies to now join in the effort. At Summit they announced several big partnerships with firms such as Accenture, Capgemini and Unilever. What does this mean for the Data and Analytics industry? Here are some high level thoughts:
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Jerry Helou
Adobe Experience Platform (AEP) is real!
I have heard about the platform since my early days at Adobe. Yes a long time coming and the fact that this is real is a game changer. I liked the way that Adobe introduced it:
“An open and extensible platform that stitches data across the
enterprise powering real-time customer profiles enhanced through
experience intelligence and governance, and activates content to
deliver real-time personalized experiences”
The platform unlocks many pressing use cases such as:
There is a lot to unpack within the platform and a lot of questions left un-answered but that is what makes our job so fun. I am confident that AEP and the Customer Experience Manager (CXM) capabilities that it unlocks are going to reinvent the way we do marketing and advertising. In my opinion, this is the ecosystem that marketers, developers, data scientists and executives have been long waiting for. The wait is over, the open / intelligent and real-time platform for customer experiences is here.
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Jean Paul Behrens
Hold on! Analysis workspace is next-leveling everything!
Analysis Workspace has leveled up the playing field of Digital Analytics. The new features released at Summit, and since the beginning of the year, continue to raise the bar and increase the ability of analysts to answer some of the most pressing business questions out there today. Below are the three most impressive features I would highlight from the sessions I attended:
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Nichole Bolenius
Potential Product Launches Unveiled: Data Unbound and Journey Genius
Historically Adobe has used Summit and the “Sneaks” session as a platform to showcase potential roadmap items as an exclusive sneak peek for attendees. About 10 products were showcased but with a real time survey during the session, two quickly became the crowd favorites (including mine).
#DataUnbound
There are two main features within the Data Unbound product.
Data accessibility and artificial intelligence.
Accessibility:
With Adobe Experience Cloud and Adobe I/O there has been a clear investment in the flexibility of data usage. Data Unbound focuses on the data within Adobe Analytics and allowing for accessibility outside of the console. To start, a Microsoft PowerPoint plugin has been created to allow for seamless integration of workspace dashboards and visualizations via an API. Additionally, with “Open Data Links” dashboards can easily be passed over to applications like Excel, Tableau, Power BI and Terminal with a simple “copy and paste” methodology. These updates are incredibly powerful as it allows for greater efficiency, elimination of “double work” and faster speed to market for data visibility.
Artificial Intelligence:
One of the largest pain points outside of data accessibility are dynamic actionable insights. This is normally where an analyst comes in, owns the report/dashboard creation and the weekly/daily/hourly evaluation of reports in order to decipher actionable insights. Data Unbound (with the inclusion of Adobe Sensei) breaks the chains for this formality and now inserts explanations and insights of the data component that is being viewed in real time.
Here is an example during the live demo on book orders for Mindy Khaling provided by Sensei:
“This line chart shows orders to Amazon and Barnes and Noble during February. Both lines show a weekly cyclical pattern with more activity on the weekend. Amazon has the most orders.
#JourneyGenius
This product also features Adobe Analytics and Sensei but with a focus on Machine Learning in support of predictive intelligence. Journey Genius is essentially Adobe’s shot at having an embedded data scientist within the console. From a visual standpoint it looks similar to JourneyIQ or Page Flow components within Workspace but adds a time, event and goal variable that users can play with in order to view historical and predicted future customer journeys. A user can essentially identify a bottle neck, have Journey Genius recommend a solution to increase a goal metric (like the triggering of a retention email before a predicted unsubscribe), then apply it to the customer journey to see the predicted impact all within the Adobe Workspace console.
This product has the most opportunity in my eyes. In a world that is more and more data driven, Journey Genius could bridge a gap to allow for optimization efforts to get into flight (especially ones that aren’t easily quantifiable) as well as providing opportunity for teams who lack data science resources.
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Andrew Johns
No one has mastered all aspects of Digital Transformation
Adobe Summit is one of the rare occasions where you have an opportunity to peek behind the polished storefronts of your favorite brands. Case study sessions, candid lunch conversations, and after-hours socializing all provide valuable insight. You may be surprised to find that the brands you look up to don’t have all aspects of their Digital Transformation completely figured out either. You are not alone.
Not a single person you talk to at Summit will say their company has it all figured out and that they are just coasting on their previous success. Every company and attendee face different challenges and come to Summit looking for answers and new ideas to improve. A flashy frontend may be coupled with chaotic operations or convoluted technical architectures. An otherwise smooth-running optimization practice may be crippled by lack of technology support to scale. Overcoming hurdles and adapting to remain competitive is what it’s all about.
Digital Transformation is not a destination, it’s a journey (until the next buzzword takes its place). Summit is a place for everyone to refuel, stock up on supplies, and gather information about what’s ahead. Don’t get discouraged when an oasis fades into the horizon. The important thing is keep going.
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Raymond Piccolotti
Mobile App Testing is About to Get a Lot Less Painful
One of the most exciting announcements I saw at Summit was ‘Project Griffin’. The mobile SDK team gave a demo on Wednesday morning to an excited audience that had obviously felt the main mobile testing and debugging. Unlike Charles, Fiddler or Bloodhound this approach does not use a proxy – this is a big deal for folks on the locked-down corporate network. Instead, you use a deep link QR code and web UI view. Some of the features include.
We will be sharing more insights in the weeks to come where we will dive deeper into more of the features announced last week at Summit. Stay tuned for more!
