What remains to be seen is whether Workfront will shift its focus to support content development and marketing use cases, perhaps at the cost of its sizable developer and nonmarketing customer base. Moving upstream means Adobe will be able to better tell a story around content ROI, understanding what resources went into creating the content so that the performance of that content is put in context.

It allows it to better compete with other DAM-MRM combos like Aprimo, which was also a Leader in our most recent DAM and MRM Forrester Wave evaluations. This will benefit buyers because it means Adobe will be better suited to support the entire content lifecycle. On the DAM side, Adobe’s investment continues a trend of market consolidation, which we detailed years ago.

And it marks a new marketing cloud entrant into the marketing operations space Adobe joins SAP, SAS, and HCL Unica as a marketing cloud investing in MRM. This acquisition is interesting because it shows that the complex processes underlying content collaboration and production aren’t easily built from scratch - Adobe would rather go the acquisition route. But Adobe has a leg up thanks to its sheer scale and existing presence in enterprise tech stacks. Using the tools in tandem, brands can build more efficient content creation processes and feed marketers’ ever-growing demands for personalized content.įrom a marketing resource management (MRM) perspective, Adobe’s entering a crowded field of MRM vendors that couple content production workflows with a DAM.

Together, Adobe and Workfront can spin a tale of coupling a Forrester Wave™ Leader digital asset manager (DAM ) and a work management tool that can handle all the planning and collaboration aspects of content production workflows. Adobe announced yesterday it’s shelling out $1.5 billion to acquire work management tool Workfront, cementing a longstanding partnership between the two companies.

Adobe buys workfront