Adobe acquired Magento for $1.68 billion and got themselves the enterprise-grade commerce platform they needed to create a seamless customer interface for their businesses. Shantanu Narayen, CEO, Adobe was quoted on the intent of the acquisition as saying, “Commerce is a part of end-to-end customer experience. Consumers and businesses now expect every interaction to be shoppable – whether on the web, mobile, social, in-product, or in-store. The addition of Magento Commerce Cloud will enable commerce to be seamlessly integrated into Adobe Cloud Experience, delivering a single platform that serves both B2B and B2C customers globally.”
As with any acquisition, there has been a lot of speculation on the pros and cons of this move. It would therefore be prudent to discuss here what the possibilities of this merger are, the benefits for companies as well as those looking to build a better digital connection with their customer base. Let’s go through it systematically:
Why Does the Adobe-Magento Acquisition Make Sense?
Customer experience and their overall purchase journey is divided into parts. Each of these parts have been addressed with specific technological solutions and integrations. As a company looking to connect with your customer seamlessly, across the customer’s purchase journey and across platforms, you will have invested in all these technologies, and most importantly what holds it all together. Naturally with so many elements inter-dependent on one another, there are bound to be hiccups; and that is where solutions such as Magento come into play.
What is needed is a tighter bond between the several elements that deal with every stage of the customer journey. In the case of Adobe and Magento, Adobe dealt with three main elements of the customer journey with their three cloud platforms, and Magento the fourth. Magento is a platform that works on both the B2C and B2B levels. With the acquisition, Adobe is now in a better position to deliver across the entire customer journey and help businesses connect with customers in a more fruitful manner.
So How Does the Acquisition Enhance Customer Experience Now?
Adobe Benefits from a Tried and Tested Magento: Numerous successful businesses have had Magento at their core. Adobe required a platform that worked on both B2C and B2B platforms and Magento was the perfect fit considering SAP and Salesforce have already been acquired. As it stands, Adobe can now offer its e-commerce business development a seamless platform. Getting to seamless stage may take a little while; but Adobe is adept at doing it, as previous acquisitions show. Bundled with Adobe’s experience manager, Magento is now a digital asset.
Magento Can Now Create Better Customer Interfaces with Adobe’s Suite of Products: Magento is an open source system and therefore is always looking for means to enhance its collection of offerings. With access to the entire Adobe suite of products, it now has the potential to deal with just about any kind of requirement from clients on the content and commerce fronts. With teams from Magento and Adobe now aligning together, they will be able to address anything that arises in channel, sales as well as marketing needs of any partnering ecosystem.
Better Collaboration Opportunities for SMEs: Being open source, Magento has so far been the go-to solution for several small and medium organizations. This has worked well for Magento, especially when they are trying to make headway in the enterprise line. With this acquisition, aligning with Magento becomes more lucrative for SMEs, because it gives them easier collaborative abilities with the powerhouse of facilities that Adobe offers. This in turn leads to a significant improvement in the way these SMEs conduct business and interact with their clients. That said, Adobe’s interest continues to remain with their new found abilities to deal with B2C and B2B; the SMEs are bonus.
Quicker Response to the Rising Expectations of Customers: The idea with the acquisition is anticipating customer needs or dealing with them as soon as they appear. A platform like Magento, with its massive open source developer strength, gives Adobe the chance to do that. Reducing customer journeys with well-targeted solutions gives businesses an upper-hand, puts Adobe in the lead and makes Magento a sought after name.
But as with any acquisition, this is still in the beginning stages and has to play out over a period of time. There are several concerns on the implementation of the acquisition and the say that the Magento workforce will have. License prices are also an issue, as merging with Adobe could raise the prices of Magento 2.0 further and this may not go down well.
The benefits of having a common integrated platform from a single vendor is definitely something that will benefit the marketplace immensely. However there is a lot of work and factors that need to be sorted out before this can take place. It is an acquisition that is being closely monitored, with the final outcome hopefully working toward a common goal – a seamless customer experience for customers. And thereby an enhancement of businesses. A win-win situation for all the segments concerned.
Would you like to know more? Talk to our Magento Experts.
