Adobe this week as part of an ongoing effort to increase the number of independent software vendors (ISVs) and partners building applications on top of its cloud platforms announced it has added a raft of tools and application programming interfaces (APIs) to the Adobe Exchange marketplace.
Announced at the Adobe Summit 2019 conference, Adobe also revealed there are now over 10,000 applications available through its online marketplace. New capabilities being added include an API gateway through application hosted on the Adobe Exchange can now make API calls to one another as well as share run-time alerts. Adobe is also making available a set of streamlined tools for packaging and distributing applications on Adobe Exchange along with a serverless computing framework that partners can invoked.
All the various cloud services that Adobe provides are hosted on the Microsoft Azure cloud. Adobe this week revealed the number of partners employing Adobe Exchange has increased 74 percent in the last 12 months. Adobe also notes the Adobe ecosystem has now expanded to include over 300,000 developers and nearly 13,000 various integrators, digital ad agencies, technology, and marketplace partners. Overall, Adobe reports there has been a 20 percent growth in organizations joining the Adobe Solution Partner Program. That program is split between partners that co-sell cloud offerings with Adobe and those that are driving sales on their own.
Partners are proving instrumental in helping Adobe expand its reach into a new realm of customer experience applications, says Jay Dettling, vice president of global partners for Adobe. That initiative is anchored around an Adobe Experience Platform that combines marketing e-commerce and analytics on a common Big Data platform. For the most part, partners are generating profits via the service they provide, says Dettling.
“Every time Adobe Experience Cloud is brought into an environment there are anywhere from 15 to 200 existing systems that need to be integrated,” says Dettling.
The existence of this platform is a major contributing factor to both the wave of new partners joining the Adobe program as well as a significant amount of merger and acquisition activity among the company’s channel partners, says Dettling. Adobe continues to aggressively recruit new partners at a time when merger and acquisition activity across its own ecosystem is rife, adds Dettling. But as end customers look to Adobe and its partners to drive digital business transformation, partners are discovering they need to add a range of capabilities to their portfolios that are often easier to acquire than build, says Dettling.
Many of the newest partners joining the Adobe ecosystem are coming from the Microsoft channel. Microsoft and Adobe have formed a deep sales, marketing, and technology alliance under which the two companies are collaborating on the development of a common data object model spanning applications from both companies. At the conference this week, Adobe and Microsoft jointly showed show Adobe marketing customer relationship management (CRM) applications and a digital supply chain application from SAP can be more easily integrated when a common data object model exists. Known as the Open Data Alliance (ODA), the three companies this week also announced they have formed a Partner Advisory Council to help accelerate development of ODA use cases. Partners participating on this council include Accenture, Amadeus, Capgemini, Change Healthcare, Cognizant, EY, Finastra, Genesys, Hootsuite, InMobi, Sprinklr, and WPP. Adobe also revealed this week that it has made available 200 open source data models on Github that it says will become foundational elements of ODA.
The fact that Adobe, Microsoft, and SAP are taking on those tasks will help partners drive adoption of more solution faster because much of the lower-level integration work is now being done by those three companies, says Glen Hartman, head of Accenture Interactive for North America.
“It allows us to focus more on developing our own accelerators,” says Hartman. “We can make that platform sing.”
The existence of validated connectors from all three companies will make it easier for Accenture to offer more fixed engagement services versus asking for customers to pay for projects based on the amount of time and labor involved, adds Hartman.
It may take a while for partners to adapt their practices to align with the level of application integration envisioned by Adobe, Microsoft, and SAP. But as that work continues to advance, it’s clear the time required to integrate various applications is about to be sharply reduced.
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