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Adobe made a big move this week, one that many digital experience software insiders suspected, it added commerce to its Adobe Experience Cloud through an acquisition. The San Jose, Calif.-based provider announced it entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Magento Commerce for $1.68 billion.
Adobe has been piecing together its digital experience software offerings through acquisitions since it bought Omniture (web analytics) for $1.8 billion and Day Software (web content management) for $240 million in a span of 10 months over 2009 and 2010. The commerce piece through Magento satisfies calls from at least one notable analyst firm that digital experience software providers that offer native apps in its software ecosystem thrive vs. those who integrate third-party apps.
Adobe officials in a press release said Magento Commerce Cloud will enable commerce to integrate into the Adobe Experience Cloud to deliver a single platform that serves both B2B and B2C customers globally. Magento's offering includes digital commerce, order management and predictive intelligence. The Adobe Experience Cloud includes solutions that help organizations with content creation, marketing, advertising, analytics and now commerce.
Magento CEO Mark Lavelle will continue to lead the Magento team as part of Adobe’s Digital Experience business, reporting to Brad Rencher, executive vice president and general manager at Adobe. The transaction is expected to close during the third quarter of Adobe’s 2018 fiscal year.
In other customer experience software news ...
Forrester Names Adobe, Aprimo, OpenText as DAM Leaders
Forrester in its Wave for Digital Asset Management for Customer Experience has named Adobe, Aprimo, and OpenText as the leaders. MediaBeacon, Bynder, CELUM, Nuxeo, Widen and Northplains are strong performers; and Cognizant, Stylelabs, Canto, and Webdam are contenders.
Forrester report author Nick Barber wrote that digital asset management (DAM) software enables organizations to organize content and deliver it, a top challenge for many organizations. "Improved support for work in progress, marketing and usability differentiates the top products," Barber wrote. "Vendors that provide superior capabilities in these areas position themselves to successfully deliver customer experiences."
HubSpot Integrates with Slack
HubSpot debuted this week an integration with Slack that will allow sales professionals to take Slack conversations and convert them to HubSpot CRM tasks. It also allows users to send notifications to Slack triggered by activities in HubSpot, and enables slash commands to search and post contact records from HubSpot, company officials said in a press release.
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HubSpot claim sales professionals that use both Slack and HubSpot will see increased productivity because they will no longer have to switch between tools to log tasks or look up contact information in HubSpot. They will be able to create a task and associate it with a contact, company or deal in HubSpot directly within Slack.
Hero Digital Acquires MaassMedia
Hero Digital, a San Francisco-based customer experience agency, has acquired MaassMedia, an analytics consultancy. Philadelphia-based MaassMedia provides digital analytics services, including strategy, analytics software implementation, data visualization, data analysis and personalization. Hero Digital officials said the acquisition will strengthen its data capabilities and help meet demand for customer experiences fueled by data. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.
Hero Digital has recently worked on campaigns with Salesforce, Sephora and Microsoft. “Insights gained through customer data will be the fuel of brand transformations," David Kilimnik, Hero Digital CEO, said in a statement.
IT Leaders Split Over Digital Disruption
Half of IT stakeholders think they are leaders and will disrupt in the age of digital transformation and the other half feel they are behind and will be disrupted by the competition in 2018. These findings come in a survey released this week by Alfresco Software. The report, “Digital Disruption: Disrupt or Be Disrupted,” (download required) is based on interviews with more than 300 digital transformation decision makers in the United States and the United Kingdom. Breaking it down per industry, more telcos (65 percent) and technology (65 percent) companies predict they will be disruptors, while 17 percent of IT stakeholders working for government and non-profit organizations worry they will be disrupted.
According to IT stakeholders, the top predictors of success are:
- Vision of their technology leadership (62 percent)
- Ability of their technology teams to execute (58 percent)
- Capabilities of new technologies, such as cloud, AI and IoT (57 percent)
The inhibitors to success include:
- Lack of budget and people resource investments (61 percent)
- Lack of vision among business leaders (48 percent)
- No willingness for company culture to embrace digital transformation (47 percent)
