Adobe is one of IBD's long-term leaders meaning it's a company with a solid track record of
strong stable earnings and sales growth and stock action that outperforms the market over extended
periods as well so we wanted to check in with the software leaders Executive Vice President
and General Manager of adobe experience cloud Anil Chakravarthy thanks so much for joining me today
Anil my pleasure thank you Alissa all right so first walk us through how the pandemic has shifted
Adobe's priorities 2020 of course was a very monumental year and required a lot of companies to
rework their strategy so walk us through that for adobe yeah when the pandemic hit like any
other companies we focused first on our employee well-being and safety making sure everybody was
okay and well set up to work from home and all of our 23 000 plus employees around the world making
sure that they were able to do that and then we immediately turned to customers you know one
of the things that we had to do within the first couple of weeks was to turn our summit conference
which was our annual which is our annual conference in Las Vegas for over 25 000 people
had to become virtual within a matter of weeks so we had to go all virtual and it started from there
and so one of the big things that we did was to really focus on what customers wanted to do with
their customers so our enterprise customers really wanted to focus on customer engagement taking care
of their customers making sure that they were reaching out to them in a personalized manner
and adapting to the change realities of not being able to interact in person and being able to
arrange new ways of communicating and transacting with their customers and that's really where we
focus so that was the adaptation it went pretty quickly in 2020 so let's drill down a little
bit more about what adobe is doing specifically to help its clients meet those new needs yeah so
we focus within the Adobe experience cloud we focus on three key areas helping customers with
their online and digital content and digital commerce helping them with understand their
customers with customer data and insights across the entire customer journey and then managing that
customer journey the digital customer journey as well as the customer journey that intersects with
their online and offline presence all of that we deliver out of a common platform called the
Adobe Experience Platform so we really help our customers become engaged with their customers
and deliver that customer experience management through a next generation technology platform
yeah customer experience management so increasingly important in this digital age and a
lot of shifting habits for consumers over over the last year so how do you think Adobe's product
line in the experience cloud can be differentiated from what other enterprise clients can get
elsewhere yeah so first of all let's just start with content the content has to be personalized it
has to be relevant it has to be at the right time in real time to the right to the right customer or
the right prospect uh whether they are on a mobile app whether they're on a website whether they're
talking to somebody from the company you have to have the right content and that is where Adobe
is a clear leader we also focus on turning every experience into potentially a shoppable experience
so how do you have the commerce well aligned with the content so that's one of the key areas that
Adobe focuses on and a number of our customers have taken advantage of that you then look at
the entire customer journey end to end when you look at the customer data adobe has long been
the leader in analytics when customers come to websites what do they actually do on the websites
and how do you take that information when you look at our you know holiday index or when you look at
any of the transactions we put we we have we we have trillions of transactions that customers
are doing every month with us and we enable customers to take advantage of that information
and make sure that they have the right offer to the customer whether it's the
next best action in terms of helping the customer in their in their purchase
or understand what next best offer they can put in to the customer which is a personalized offer
so those are some of the examples of things that adobe does that are very unique and that really
help our customers engage with their customers whether it's a b2b company or a b2c company
and and do that you know with adapting to the pandemic so that you can do it both
online and offline where where it makes sense right so taking a step back here and
talking about the cloud computing market and the digital transformation at the enterprise
level where do you think that we are in terms of the the growth opportunity for that market
we've obviously seen a huge uh increase in digital engagement and digital commerce but we're still in
the early innings a lot of customers and we've seen that for example take traditional retailers
we have a number of retailers that we work with who were still they had a an online presence
but they were still doing a lot of their business through their stores and what we've seen now is
an explosion of innovation where either their online sales have moved dramatically up or they
have a hybrid model where you can buy online and then you can come and pick up uh curbside for
example these are all innovations that people have done just in the last you know year or so and so
we think we are still in the early stages of that explosion of digital commerce digital engagement
and a new version of digital experiences so bringing it back to adobe from the experience
cloud where do you think from a business strategy perspective are there more gains to be made
well we focus on everybody from the largest enterprises we serve pretty much
everybody in the largest among the largest enterprises in every vertical all the way
down to mid-size companies because everybody needs that so from adobe's perspective especially from
the perspective of the adobe experience cloud we focus on helping any size company any size
organization whether it's a b2b company or a b2c company really put up that digital storefront
the digital front end that really exp helps them build that next generation of customer experience
and it's not just about the digital storefront based on adobe's own experience with what we
call our data driven operating model which is the entire customer life cycle from how they
discover pro the company's products to how they try them buy them use them and then renew them in
a subscription manner we we help our customers with that entire end-to-end journey as well so
that's how we are interacting and we are serving a very broad swath of customers globally well
harnessing data is extremely important for any enterprise and Adobe's definitely in the
thick of that so thank you so much Anil for your insights today my pleasure thank you for having me
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