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As a customer data platform (CDP) architect and industry analyst, I enjoy researching trends among CDP buyers and sellers, deciphering why certain vendors are excelling, and helping organizations think strategically about their CDP initiatives. Looking to the future and predicting the outcome of the CDP marketplace has taught me that it’s just as helpful to look backward as it is to look forward. That combination of hindsight and foresight has taught me that Adobe deserves noteworthy credit for the advancement of their CDP offering — Adobe Experience Platform and Real-Time CDP — and that their future is actually much brighter than some experts think.

Adobe’s roots were in applications, not platforms

If you’re not familiar with Adobe, their marketing technology history was primarily in software applications — really great ones. Adobe acquired best-of-breed marketing technology (MarTech) applications for web analytics, web content management, web advertising management, web experience testing and personalization, B2B campaign management, and more. These applications helped make Adobe an early leader in the MarTech space.

But while it’s easy to assemble an attractive portfolio by acquiring the leading vendor in each emerging technology space (assuming billions of dollars are available), it’s extremely difficult to make all these tools work together. That’s noteworthy because Adobe did not have a history in building platforms, that is, tools designed to centralize responsibilities from adjacent applications — such as data storage and data management — so these applications can become more integrated and efficient. Since this was not Adobe’s strength, their engineers needed to develop a new muscle for architecting platforms, ones that were extendable, interoperable, and reliable.

Adobe saw the gap earlier than their cloud competitors and acted swiftly

Unlike some of their competitors, Adobe took the 2018 CDP hype seriously from its onset and dedicated immediate capacity toward developing their own platform. This platform had its bumps and bruises in the beginning, but Adobe never wavered, instead doubling down on their strategy with increased commitment to developing their product. While others simply checked the box with a CDP offering — often despite missing functionalities considered to be core of a CDP — Adobe sought to create something special by dedicating enormous resources to its ongoing development.

Adobe released new functionality quickly (particularly in the last two years)

The by-product of Adobe’s CDP commitment was continuous waves of new functionality. One after another, Adobe shored up their gaps in areas like predictive analytics and journey orchestration, then created differentiating capabilities like descriptive analytics/dashboarding (a top-ranked issue), data governance, and more. To recap some highlights, here’s a short list to make it more tangible.

Developments that caught Adobe up with their competitors:

• Adobe Journey Orchestration (AJO) to streamline campaign management
• Data transformation capabilities to assist attribute creation
• UI friendliness to help marketers feel more comfortable
• Profile API to enable sub-second real-time read and response
• Partnerships with ID providers to enable resolution and enrichment
• APIs/connections to ease concerns with non-Adobe tool integrations
• Identity graph to enable acquisition and retargeting use cases
• Predictive models to assist personalization (e.g., look-alike modeling)

Developments that are helping Adobe surpass their competitors:

• Created Healthcare Shield to enable HIPAA and tricky use cases within healthcare
• Created Customer Journey Analytics (CJA) to surpass the competition
• Created governance capabilities
• Predictive modeling now includes impressive wizard-based model builder
• Open APIs

It’s still a race, but it’s hard not to bet on Adobe

Do flaws still exist with Adobe’s CDP? Absolutely. Customers still seek robust data transformation capabilities, for example. But every vendor’s CDP has weaknesses, and that’s part of reality in the technology space. Yet if you’re trying to predict whether a vendor is likely to become a leader in their space, I often look at one metric — rate of development.

Rate of development is the pace at which a vendor is releasing new capabilities for their product. And it’s critical because what’s happened recently is extremely predictive of what’s coming next (thank you, predictive analytics experience). For example, if a vendor is developing its product quickly (regardless of how far behind their product was when they started), they’re likely to keep developing quickly and eventually pass their competitors. Adobe has proved they’re committed to continuous innovation to deliver new capabilities to the market. They’ve been doing it for over two years.

And that’s way more predictive of who’s going to come out on top than looking at which vendors got to market first.

Yes, many CDP vendors are still investing heavily in their product development — including independents like Redpoint, Treasure Data, Amperity, and ActionIQ, as well as marketing clouds like Salesforce. But Adobe has commitment and deep pockets, and that helps them continue development through slow economic times when other vendors are forced to slow down and tighten their belts. It’s also an advantage that Adobe has immediate access to new purchasers since virtually every enterprise is already using some Adobe tool in its stack.

Conclusion

Keeping in mind where Adobe came from — along with when they released their CDP to market — they deserve great merit for their CDP development. Their commitment and rate of development foreshadow a future of continued product releases that would merit their inclusion in virtually any enterprise CDP evaluation. As someone who doubted Adobe in the early part of this decade, I will be the first to say I was wrong.