How the new cloud-native Adobe Experience Manager will accelerate performance and experience delivery

As consumers continue to demand more personalized interactions, brands have struggled with larger volumes of content that need to be delivered faster across increasingly sophisticated customer journeys. Content consumption is rising at record speed: Millennials now spend 8.5 hours every day consuming digital content while Gen Z ramps that figure up to 10.6 hours per day .¹ With online holiday spend in the United States surpassing $140B and 14% growth YoY², content demands are simply going to increase. Yet, without content and context, data is just information, and commerce doesn’t occur.

According to Adobe research,³ 61% of consumers say they expect companies to know and respect them — meaning they want brands to engage with them in ways that are personalized and connected. Yet only 64% of companies say that they have a content management system (CMS) in place, and only 31% say they can publish content to multiple channels without having to handcraft each piece of content separately, according to the Content Marketing Institute (CMI).

Adobe Experience Manager has helped thousands of brands manage and deliver more engaging experiences across websites, mobile apps and growing physical venues^{4 & 5}. Now, with Adobe’s introduction of Adobe Experience Manager as a Cloud Service, we can support a new decade of increasingly content hungry customer interactions.

The effort of re-architecting Experience Manager to take advantage of cloud-native technologies started several years ago. It is built upon a container-based architecture, purpose-built DevOps process and modular microservices to dramatically enhance the rich content and asset management capabilities of Experience Manager.

We shared this vision of Adobe Experience Manager as a Cloud Service with Under Armour last year during Adobe Summit, and they were as excited as we were.

“We rapidly bought into the vision to grow our platform into something really scalable, improve our operational efficiencies, and have access to the latest and greatest Adobe Experience Manager offering,” says Ben Snyder, IT product owner at Under Armour.

According to Snyder, Under Armour saw their digital asset upload time for thousands of high-res graphics cut in half, ensuring that the team was able to create image renditions and share them out to their global retail and wholesale partners efficiently.

For Esri, the mapping and geospatial analytics software company, faster time to launch was the key to their switch to a cloud-native service.

“When you’re building new website experiences, the creative team first designs the new web components. Then developers spend time developing those components before actually updating the site experience,” said Steve Schultz, Esri’s head of marketing technology. “Anything we can do to reduce that development time and be able to more quickly build out site experiences and iterate on that multiple times is worth the investment.”

Since the deployment of Adobe Experience Manager as a Cloud Service, Esri’s development time has improved by 20-50%. And, Schultz said, there’s a much better “code-checking process” when pushing out new code or new components to the cloud. “Our team has already seen and felt the impact of having our code quality assured and cleaned before it goes live.”

For more on Adobe Experience Manager as a Cloud Service, click here.

1 Source: Adobe Consumer Content Survey 2018

2 Source: Adobe Holiday Shopping Trends 2019

3 https://theblog.adobe.com/helping-businesses-measure-experience/

⁴https://www.adobe.com/content/dam/acom/en/modal-offers/idc-aem-sites-q218/pdfs/22037555.en.aem.whitepaper.IDCBusinessValueAEMSites.pdf

⁵https://www.adobe.com/content/dam/www/us/en/pdf-cards/idc/idc-business-value-case-study.pdf