Adobe Named to Cloud Wars Top 10, Beating Out Dell and Alibaba

With its enterprise-focused Experience Cloud having grown 31% to $3.21 billion in fiscal 2019, Adobe is joining the Cloud Wars Top 10 list of the most-influential and -strategic cloud vendors in the world.

Over the past several weeks, I analyzed 3 candidates for the #10 spot on the Cloud Wars Top 10: Adobe, Alibaba and Dell.

Alibaba’s clearly got a high-growth cloud business but its impact outside China has not been significant enough to warrant inclusion on the Top 10.

Dell’s various business units, including VMware, have adapted nicely to the cloud phenomenon but are often behind-the-scenes players rather than front-line providers of cloud services to businesses.

Adobe, on the other hand, is driving a dynamic set of high-growth cloud services essential to the digital transformations sweeping every industry and creating a truly digital economy.

While Adobe certainly offers some products aimed at consumers and others not geared toward corporate customers, its Digital Experience Cloud accounts for well over 25% of the company’s total revenue and is growing at the high-velocity rates typical among the Cloud Wars Top 10: 31% for Adobe’s fiscal year ended Nov. 29, and 24% for that fiscal Q4.

Here’s CEO Shantanu Narayen describing that business in Adobe’s fiscal-Q4 earnings call in mid-December:

In the experience economy, every business must be a digital business and Adobe Experience Cloud is the industry leader for powering digital businesses. The ever-increasing demand for data and insights, content and personalization, customer journey management, commerce and advertising is expanding our total addressable market for Experience Cloud to $84 billion by 2022. We’re leveraging our relationships with Chief Marketing Officers and Chief Digital Officers to drive Customer Experience Management (CXM) across the enterprise.

With Adobe Experience Platform we are becoming mission critical to the Chief Information Officer. We’ve extended our offerings and go-to-market across both B2B and B2C and are expanding our footprint in the mid-market segment. We’re rapidly evolving our CXM product strategy to deliver generational technology platforms, launch innovative new services and introduce enhancements to our market-leading applications. 

Adobe Experience Platform is the industry’s first purpose-built CXM platform. With real-time customer profiles, continuous intelligence, and an open and extensible architecture, Adobe Experience Platform makes delivering personalized customer experiences at scale a reality.

Citing some key Q4 wins among marquis customers for Digital Experience, Narayen mentioned Goldman Sachs, Marriott, McDonald’s and Qualcomm.

For the Adobe Experience Platform and the company’s new Real-Time Customer Data Platform, Narayen cited strong momentum in financial services, manufacturing, media and entertainment, retail, telecommunications and travel and hospitality. 

We welcome Adobe to the Cloud Wars Top 10. Later this week or early next, we will be following up with some additional insights and analysis around Adobe’s release of its fiscal-Q1 numbers on March 12.

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