Adobe acquires Workfront, betting $1.5 billion for work management

Multimedia and digital marketing software giant Adobe announced yesterday that it will acquire Workfront, a pioneer in work management, for $1.5 billion. The price reflects the growth that the industry is currently seeing, and it also includes Asana, which debuted in the recent IPO, Atlassian, which is popular among developers, and many smaller companies invested by venture capital institutions. However, with the marketing team taking the lead in adopting this platform, did Adobe simply purchase accessories for its existing tools for marketers? Or set your sights on greater opportunities?

After the acquisition, Workfront will become part of Adobe’s digital experience business unit led by Anil Chakravarthy, who was the CEO of integration provider Informatica and joined Adobe in January. In the announcement of the transaction, Adobe emphasized the combination of Workfront and its Experience Cloud to “bring efficiency, collaboration and productivity improvements to marketing teams currently facing the challenge of isolated work management solutions,” adding that Workfront’s 3,000 One third of the customers are already Adobe customers, including Deloitte, Under Armour, Nordstrom, Prudential Financial, T-Mobile and Home Depot.

After the transaction is completed, Workfront CEO Alex Shootman will report to Chakravarthy, and he has strengthened his marketing focus when discussing the transaction with Bloomberg:

When you have the opportunity to work with a company that the CMO relies on for business (ie Adobe), and you are a company like Workfront, this will enable us to move forward in achieving our goals for several years.

Workfront is more than just marketing

However, just describing Workfront as a feature for the marketing team does not tell the whole story. Take its customer Prudential Financial as an example. The company began to adopt the technology within its marketing function, but has since spread to many other parts of the company. When speaking at Workfront’s Analyst Day a few weeks ago, Kevin Brucato was not only the vice president of Creative Operations, but also the head of the financial services group’s “Future of Work” internal transformation strategy. He described how the company uses Workfront to integrate Of new employees onboard. Enter Workday, ServiceNow, Office 365 and Sharepoint. Workfront has become the default platform for automating the entire process across multiple different applications and functions. He explained:

This makes our users [to] Stay in their comfortable environment and then actually extract the data and transfer the conversation or information to a real source.

The same pattern that has been gradually extended to other functions has been repeated in many other Workfront customers. The creative or marketing team demonstrated what can be achieved by automating and tracking its work, and other teams have followed suit. After years of exponential growth in usage, some of its largest customers can now use Workfront in multiple functions. Shootman positions the company as providing a “recorded operating system” that can help companies achieve more achievements for all employees through intelligent collaboration and automation. He said:

We are managing human capital in the same way that we learned to manage factories and equipment.

The double whammy of the marketing team

To be sure, in the current marketing team of Adobe customers, Workfront has a wide range of services. This year’s pandemic has increased the importance of digital interaction while forcing marketing teams to perform distributed work outside the office. While having to adapt to the new digital teamwork model, this is a double blow to the increased workload.

This laid the foundation for fertile ground such as Workfront, which developed a complete maturity model for the entire work automation. It can increase the complexity to a certain extent, help the team automate and manage the workflow, so that they can get rid of the inefficiency caused by endless video conferences and Slack messages. The trick is to automate the process and start collecting and analyzing data about the workflow itself.

Workfront also has extensive experience in helping Adobe customers build workflows that cover the various components of Experience Cloud and assets developed by Creative Cloud (for example, the marketing team of Under Armour or CenturyLink). As Paige Erickson, senior vice president of business development at Workfront, told Jon Reed of diginomica in April 2019:

I think Adobe also believes that this workflow needs to be carried out between these two clouds, and we use this secret method to achieve this goal…

[For example] If you are in Creative Cloud, you don’t have to leave Creative Cloud. You can send proof of any content you want your manager to review through Workfront. They view it and send it back to mark it, which is very seamless. After entering the finals, if you have created an event or a similar event, you can send it out through Workfront, then integrate it with our AEM, and then proceed to deploy through Adobe campaigns.

However, Workfront has also established integration and partnerships with many other vendors besides Adobe, including CX competitors Salesforce, ServiceNow, Microsoft and Google. They are still important for process automation that customers value. Now that the opportunities in Adobe’s own turf are so great, is it worth reducing Workfront’s focus? Or is there a bigger plan waiting?

The transaction is expected to be completed within the December to February time frame of Adobe’s first quarter of fiscal 2021.

I take

The danger of major control changes to the supplier’s existing customers is well understood. But I can hardly believe that Adobe will simply abandon Workfront’s larger ambitions and limit its responsibilities to marketing functions. On the one hand, this may risk some of Workfront’s largest customers, many of whom are also important customers of Adobe. Of course, we will focus on marketing, because after this deal, the minimum results can be found. But Workfront’s experience beyond marketing makes it possible for Adobe not only to consolidate its control over the marketing team, but also to extend its business scope to the entire enterprise.

Also remember that Adobe already has a place in the rest of the enterprise through its Acrobat franchise. Dating back ten years ago, Adobe ambitiously integrated this presence into a broader portfolio of cloud-based productivity tools. After acquiring Workfront and hiring Chakravarthy, these ambitions may now be rekindled and further expanded to the digital team market. If this is the case, as Adobe builds its collaboration canvas to guide the progress of corporate teamwork, you can look forward to further acquisitions, most likely in terms of cloud content or messaging.