Item 1. Business
ITEM 1. BUSINESS
Founded in 1982, Adobe Inc. is one of the largest and most diversified software companies in the world. We offer a line of products and services used by creative professionals including photographers, video editors, designers and developers; communicators including content creators, students, marketers and knowledge workers; businesses of all sizes; and consumers for creating, managing, delivering, measuring, optimizing, engaging and transacting with compelling content and experiences across personal computers, devices and media. We market our products and services directly to enterprise customers through our sales force and local field offices. We license our products to end users through app stores and our own website at www.adobe.com. We offer many of our products via a Software-as-a-Service (“SaaS”) model or a managed services model (both of which are referred to as hosted or cloud-based) as well as through term subscription and pay-per-use models. We also distribute certain products and services through a network of distributors, value-added resellers (“VARs”), systems integrators (“SIs”), independent software vendors (“ISVs”), retailers, software developers and original equipment manufacturers (“OEMs”). In addition, we license our technology to hardware manufacturers, software developers and service providers for use in their products and solutions. Our products run on personal and server-based computers, as well as on smartphones, tablets and other devices, depending on the product. We have operations in the Americas; Europe, Middle East and Africa (“EMEA”); and Asia-Pacific (“APAC”).
Adobe was originally incorporated in California in October 1983 and was reincorporated in Delaware in May 1997. Our executive offices and principal facilities are located at 345 Park Avenue, San Jose, California 95110-2704. Our telephone number is 408-536-6000 and our website is www.adobe.com. Investors can obtain copies of our SEC filings from this site free of charge, as well as from the SEC website at www.sec.gov. The information posted to our website is not incorporated into this Annual Report on Form 10-K.
BUSINESS OVERVIEW
For over 35 years, Adobe’s innovations have transformed how individuals, teams, businesses and governments engage and interact with their constituents in print and online. We help our customers create and deliver the most compelling experiences in streamlined workflows and optimize those experiences for greater return on investment. Our solutions turn ordinary interactions into valuable digital experiences, across media and devices, anytime, anywhere.
While we continue to offer a broad portfolio of products, services and solutions, we focus our investments in two strategic growth areas:
Digital Media – providing products, services and solutions that enable individuals, teams and enterprises to create, publish and promote their content anywhere and accelerate their productivity by modernizing how they view, share and engage with documents and creative content. Our customers include creative professionals like photographers, video editors, graphic and experience designers, and app and game developers; communicators like content creators, students, marketers and knowledge workers who create, collaborate on and distribute documents and creative content; and consumers. This is the core of what we have delivered for decades, and we have evolved our business model to provide our customers with a range of
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flexible solutions that allow them to reach their full creative potential anytime, anywhere, on any device, and on projects of all types.
Digital Experience – providing a comprehensive and integrated platform and set of applications and services through Adobe Experience Cloud that enable brands and businesses of all sizes to create, manage, execute, measure, monetize and optimize customer experiences that span from analytics to commerce. Our customers include marketers, advertisers, agencies, publishers, merchandisers, merchants, web analysts, data scientists, developers, marketing executives, information management and technology executives, product development executives and sales and support executives. Underpinning Adobe Experience Cloud is our Adobe Experience Platform, which provides businesses and brands with an open and extensible platform for customer experience management that transforms customer data into real-time robust customer profiles and uses insights driven by artificial intelligence (“AI”) to enable the delivery of personalized digital experiences in milliseconds. By combining the creativity of our Digital Media business with the science of our Digital Experience offerings, we help our customers more efficiently and effectively make, manage, measure and monetize their content across channels and devices with an end-to-end workflow and feedback loop.
We believe we are uniquely positioned to be a leader in both the Digital Media and Digital Experience markets, where our mission to change the world through digital experiences has never been more relevant, as people seek new ways to communicate, learn and conduct business virtually. By integrating products from each of these areas, our customers are able to utilize a comprehensive suite of solutions and services that no other company currently offers. In addition, our ability to deliver innovation and productivity improvements across customer workflows involving the creation, management, delivery, measurement and optimization of engaging content favorably positions Adobe as our customers continue to invest in delivering digital experiences.
SEGMENTS
Our business is organized into three reportable segments: Digital Media, Digital Experience and Publishing and Advertising. These segments provide Adobe’s senior management with a comprehensive financial view of our key businesses. Our segments are aligned around our two strategic growth opportunities further described below, placing our Publishing and Advertising business in a third segment that contains some of our legacy products and solutions.
In the fourth quarter of fiscal 2020, we moved our Adobe Advertising Cloud offerings from our Digital Experience segment into our Publishing and Advertising segment in order to more closely align our Digital Experience business with our strategic growth priorities.
MARKET OVERVIEW
This overview provides an explanation of our markets and a discussion of strategic opportunities in fiscal 2021 and beyond for each of our segments. See “Results of Operations” within Part II, Item 7 titled “Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations” and Note 2 of Part II, Item 8 titled “Notes to Consolidated Financial Statements” for further segment information.
Digital Media
Digital Media Opportunity
Recent technology trends in digital communications continue to provide a significant market opportunity for Adobe in digital media. Everyone has a story to tell — from creative professionals, to communicators, to consumers — and with content creation and consumption exploding across every type of device, they need the tools to tell those stories on an ever-increasing number of canvasses. In today’s world where the velocity of creation and consumption of digital content is constantly growing, design and creativity have never been more relevant and customers are looking for a way to meet demand with engaging online experiences. Adobe is in a strong position to capitalize on this opportunity with innovation that will accelerate the creative process across all platforms and devices, deepen engagement with communities and accelerate long-term revenue growth by focusing on cloud-based offerings, which are licensed on a subscription basis.
The flagship of our Digital Media business is Adobe Creative Cloud — a subscription service that allows members to use Adobe’s creative products integrated with cloud-delivered services across desktop, web and mobile devices. Creative Cloud addresses the needs of creative professionals such as artists, designers, developers, students and administrators, as well as knowledge workers, marketers, educators, hobbyists, communicators and consumers, all of whom use our products to create and deliver content. Our customers rely on our products for content creation, design, video and animation production, mobile app and gaming development, and document creation and collaboration. End users of our creative products work in businesses of all sizes ranging from large publishers, media companies and global enterprises, to smaller design agencies and individual freelancers. Moreover, our creative products are used to create much of the printed and online information people see, read and
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interact with every day, including video, animation, mobile and advertising content. We have introduced new products, features and services to address emerging categories of content creation, such as voice-based prototyping, refined content creation tools, 3D, augmented reality (“AR”), virtual reality and user experience design across devices and platforms. Digital content creation has transcended the desktop and so we continue to expand our footprint on tablets and mobile devices with touch-first and stylus-first apps like Photoshop for iPad, Illustrator for iPad, Adobe Fresco, Adobe Spark, Adobe Aero, Premiere Rush, Photoshop Express and Photoshop Camera. Creative Cloud members can download and access the latest versions of our creative products such as Photoshop, Illustrator, Adobe Premiere Pro, Lightroom, InDesign, Adobe XD and many more creative applications. To expand our reach and improve the way we serve the needs of our customers, we create different combinations of these services, including our applications with free and paid tiers such as Adobe XD and Adobe Fresco, that have brought new customers into our franchise. In addition, members can access built-in templates and presets created by the Adobe user community to jumpstart designs and step-by-step interactive tutorials to sharpen their skills and get up to speed quickly. Through Creative Cloud, members can access online services to sync, store and share files across users’ devices, access marketplace, social and community-based features within our Adobe Stock and Behance services, and create apps and websites, all at affordable subscription pricing. New projects announced and solutions offered include Illustrator on iPad and Adobe Fresco on iPhone, both of which will enable a seamless content creation experience across devices and help us continue to attract a tablet- and mobile-centric audience.
Adobe continues to redefine the creative process with Creative Cloud so that our customers can obtain everything they need to create, collaborate and be inspired. One part of our strategy is Adobe Sensei, a proprietary framework and set of intelligent services for dramatically improving the design and delivery of digital experiences. Adobe Sensei leverages Adobe’s massive content and data assets, as well as its deep domain expertise in the creative, marketing and document segments, within a unified AI and machine learning framework to help customers discover hidden opportunities, reduce tedious processes and offer relevant experiences to every customer.
Adobe’s Digital Media segment includes our Document Cloud business, built around our Acrobat family of products and a unified, cloud-based document services platform, which includes Acrobat, Adobe Sign and Adobe Scan. Digital documents have a mission-critical role in powering modern businesses with tens of millions of communicators worldwide interacting with documents every day. Across industries and across the world, business processes from contracting to invoicing to employee onboarding are making the change from paper to digital documents, a trend that has accelerated as businesses of all sizes shifted to remote work as a result of the pandemic. Cloud services and mobile devices are reshaping how we work, enabling greater flexibility and collaboration across global, dispersed teams. For over 25 years, Acrobat has provided for the reliable creation and exchange of digital documents, regardless of platform or application source type. Users can collaborate on documents with comments and tailor the security of a file in order to distribute reliable Adobe PDF documents that can be viewed, printed or filled out utilizing our free Acrobat Reader app on any device. Acrobat provides essential digital document capabilities and services across desktop, mobile devices and the web to help knowledge workers and communicators accomplish a wide variety of tasks ranging from simple publications and forms to mission-critical engineering documentation and architectural plans. With our Acrobat product family and its innovative cloud services, we have extended the capabilities of our Sensei-powered document actions, from view and create, to edit, secure, scan, review, embed, share and sign. Users can create a PDF with just the camera on their phone with Adobe Scan, easily read and edit PDFs on tablets and mobile devices with the Acrobat Reader app on iOS and Android, and turn slow, manual signing processes into automated experiences by collecting signatures with Adobe Sign.
Digital Media Strategy
Our goal is to be the leading platform for creativity where we offer a range of products and services that allow individuals, small and medium businesses, enterprises and government institutions, and both professionals and enthusiasts, to design and deliver amazing digital content.
We believe there is significant opportunity for growth across all customer segments and expect Adobe Creative Cloud will drive sustained long-term revenue growth through a continued expansion of our customer base by using our products to enable everyone to create and tell their stories on a variety of surfaces and platforms, expanding into new categories and technologies like immersive 3D and AR, making the creative process more iterative and collaborative with seamless cloud-enabled collaboration and workflows, delivering intelligent, time-saving features with Adobe Sensei’s artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities, and acquiring new users by engaging with the creative community with live tutorials and our social communities like Behance.
We will continue to deepen our relationship with existing users through data-driven customer engagement, meeting their needs holistically and delivering additional features and increased value, by offering products and features powered by AI and machine learning through Adobe Sensei. We continue to develop more applications and features like Creative Cloud Libraries that enable collaboration and allow our customers to seamlessly share and access their assets in the cloud. With solutions like
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Adobe Fresco for iPhone, Illustrator for iPad, and “Liquid Mode”, a breakthrough reading experience for PDFs on Acrobat for mobile devices, our customers can use our tools wherever inspiration strikes, whether on mobile, tablet, desktop or web. We are embracing new frontiers in technology and creativity such as immersive 3D and AR experiences with Adobe Aero and our Substance suite of products. We are pursuing new ways to engage and inspire our community and help our customers develop creative skills such as allowing creators to live-stream their creative process on Behance directly from native Creative Cloud applications and allowing users to learn with step-by-step, in-app, interactive tutorials from experienced creators. With our Adobe Stock and Adobe Fonts services, we offer marketplaces that are built into our Creative Cloud products for Creative Cloud subscribers to purchase stock content and fonts.
As appropriate, we plan to optimize our pricing strategy and move our customers to higher-priced and better-value offerings and continue to employ targeted promotions that attract past customers and potential users to try out and ultimately subscribe to Adobe Creative Cloud. To target new customers and better address the needs of our existing customers, we will continue to invest in driving innovation to maintain the leadership position that we have established. As part of our Creative Cloud strategy, we utilize a data-driven operating model and our Adobe Experience Cloud solutions to drive and optimize customer awareness, engagement and licensing of our creative products and services at every stop of the customer journey through our website and across other channels. Adobe.com is the central destination where we engage individual and small business customers to sign up for and renew Creative Cloud subscriptions. We offer free apps and trials, as well as our mobile and tablet apps, to attract new customers and use our data-driven operating model to optimize conversion of these customers to paid subscribers. Our collaboration services also help us expand our universe of business customers beyond creative professionals, as other stakeholders use our products for review purposes, copywriting or leveraging templates for social media marketing. We utilize channel partners to target mid-size creative customers with our Creative Cloud for teams offering. Our direct sales force is focused on building relationships with our largest customers and driving adoption of our Creative Cloud for enterprise offering. Overall, our strategy with Creative Cloud is designed to enable us to increase our revenue with users, attract more new customers, and grow a recurring and predictable revenue stream that is recognized ratably.
We offer many of the products included in Creative Cloud on a standalone basis, including subscriptions to the Creative Cloud version of certain point products. We also offer a range of other creative tools and services, including our hobbyist products such as Photoshop Elements and Premiere Elements, libraries of creative assets like Adobe Stock and Adobe Fonts and tailored, mobile-first apps such as Photoshop Camera, Adobe Aero, Adobe Capture, Adobe Fresco for iPhone, Premiere Rush and Adobe Spark that allow creators to capture, create, enhance and share content within seconds. Further descriptions of our Digital Media products are included below under “Principal Products and Services.”
In our Adobe Document Cloud business, Adobe Acrobat has achieved strong market adoption and a leadership position in document-intensive industries such as government, financial services, pharmaceutical, legal, aerospace, insurance and technical publishing. Trillions of PDF documents are created every year, which reflects the growing role PDF plays across practically every segment of the economy, and we believe there remain hundreds of millions of users in industries that engage with PDF files on a daily basis like legal, financial services or publishing, as well as a broader array of communicators and Acrobat Reader users, who need the capabilities provided by our Acrobat applications and the document services platform found in Document Cloud. As digital documents and processes become central to business continuity in today’s remote work environment, the paper-to-digital transformation is accelerating and we’re accelerating document productivity in turn with Adobe Document Cloud, enabling individuals and businesses to operate successfully.
We expect to drive sustained long-term revenue growth in Document Cloud through a continued expansion of our customer base by delivering the best PDF experience on every platform and across platforms, expanding the number of actions and features in Acrobat, using Adobe Sensei across our document products and services to make both new and legacy documents more intelligent and responsive, and investing in embedded document services such as integrating Acrobat and Adobe Sign functionality in third-party applications. As with our Creative Cloud strategy, we utilize a data-driven operating model to market our Document Cloud solutions and optimize our subscription-based pricing for individuals as well as small and medium-sized businesses, large enterprises and government institutions around the world. We aim to increase our seat penetration in our key markets through the utilization of our corporate and volume licensing programs. We also intend to increase our focus on marketing and licensing Acrobat in targeted vertical markets such as education, financial services, telecommunications and government, as well as on expanding into emerging markets. We will continue to engage in strategic partnerships to help drive the enterprise business, including our partnerships with Microsoft, Workday, ServiceNow and Notarize.
Our Document Cloud customers increasingly expect business processes to be seamless across desktop, web and mobile devices. Acrobat Reader on mobile devices can be used to create, edit, export, combine, collaborate on and share PDFs on the go and the new “Liquid Mode” feature automatically reformats text, images and tables for quick navigation and consumption on smaller screens. The Adobe Scan app for mobile devices can be used to capture paper documents as images and transform them into full-featured PDFs via Document Cloud services that can be shared immediately, essentially putting scanning
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capabilities in the pocket of every person with a mobile device. We are delivering quick access to PDF document services on the web, allowing users to create, edit, convert and compress PDFs on Adobe.com. Our Adobe Sign service also provides a green alternative to costly paper-based solutions, and is a more modern and convenient way for customers to digitally manage their documents, processes and contract workflows. We believe that by growing the awareness of electronic signatures in the broader contract delivery and signing market, utilizing Adobe Sensei to enhance customer experiences through machine learning and AI, and continuing to add new capabilities to our Acrobat, Adobe Scan and Adobe Sign offerings, we can help our customers migrate away from paper-based express mailing and adopt our solution to modernize and digitize document experiences, growing our revenue with this business in the process.
Digital Experience
Digital Experience Opportunity
Digital transformation is a macro trend that affects every business, government and educational institution today – making every business a digital business. Consumers today buy experiences, not just products, and they demand compelling and personalized experiences in their digital interactions that are well-designed, context-aware, seamless and secure across channels and devices. Enterprises and brands recognize that customers have more choices and lower switching costs than ever before. In this new hyper-connected digital environment, it is the customer experience that differentiates brands and ultimately determines customer loyalty. As a result, businesses must determine how to best attract, engage, acquire and retain customers in a digital world where the reach and quality of experiences directly impact success. Business customers are consumers too, and they increasingly have the same expectations, which are driving business-to-business (“B2B”) companies to deliver business-to-consumer (“B2C”) experiences with a “business-to-everyone” (“B2E”) strategy. Delivering the best experience to a consumer at a given moment requires the right combination of data, insights and content across multiple channels in real time. To deliver these multi-channel experiences that are personalized to every customer, executives are increasingly demanding solutions that optimize their consumers’ experiences in real time and deliver the greatest return on marketing and IT spend so they can demonstrate the business impact of their programs using objective metrics.
For the past decade, Adobe Experience Cloud has helped businesses provide exceptional experiences to their customers via a comprehensive suite of solutions. We continue to believe that addressing the challenges of customer experience management is a large and growing opportunity and we are in position to help our customers digitally transform their businesses. The world’s leading brands are increasingly steering their marketing, advertising and development budgets toward digital experiences. As more and more enterprises continue this move to digital, our opportunity is accelerating as brands seek vendors to help them navigate this transition. Enterprises have a mandate to deliver meaningful experiences to their consumers across digital channels where consumers expect experiences to be consistent and personalized.
Our Adobe Experience Cloud business targets this large and growing opportunity to help companies deliver the most engaging customer experiences by providing an integrated, comprehensive set of solutions for customer experience management. Together, our applications, services and platforms provide real-time data and insights, deliver personalized content and commerce at scale, enable customer journey management and provide a powerful platform for work management. Our solutions address analytics, personalization, digital experience management, marketing automation and engagement, cross-channel campaign management, content management, creative asset management, audience management, digital commerce, order management, predictive intelligence and monetization. Collectively, these comprehensive solutions enable marketers to measure, personalize and optimize digital experiences across all channels and touch points to drive stronger business performance throughout the customer journey.
We believe the market for Adobe Experience Cloud is large and rapidly growing as more businesses and enterprises invest in solutions that aid their goals to transform how they engage with their customers and constituents digitally.
Digital Experience Strategy
Our goal is to be the leading provider of cloud-based solutions for delivering digital experiences and enabling digital transformation. The Adobe Experience Cloud applications and services are designed to manage customer journeys, enable shoppable experiences and deliver intelligence for businesses of any size in any industry. Our differentiation and competitive advantage is strengthened by our ability to use the Adobe Experience Platform to connect our comprehensive set of solutions.
Adobe Experience Cloud delivers the following sets of solutions for our customers:
• Customer data and insights . Our solutions deliver real-time customer profiles and intelligence across the customer journey. Adobe Analytics provides an experience system of intelligence for real-time cross-channel data, insights and activations across every channel. Adobe Audience Manager, our data management platform, helps digital publishers build unique audience profiles to identify the most valuable segments and use them across any digital
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channel. Adobe Experience Platform ingests, processes and stitches data across sources, channels and customer interactions in real time to create robust unified customer profiles. Adobe’s Real-time Customer Data Platform service, built on Adobe Experience Platform, delivers real-time personalization at scale to enable brands to bring together known and unknown customer data to activate customer profiles across channels and leverage intelligent decision making throughout the customer journey. Our Customer Journey Analytics service brings a powerful set of analytics tools to omnichannel data in Adobe Experience Platform, providing brands viewing data across channels an easy, interactive way to dig deeper and uncover new insights, while making analytics more accessible across their organization.
• Content and commerce . We offer solutions to help customers manage, deliver, test, target and optimize content delivery and enable shopping experiences that scale from mid-market to enterprise businesses. Our leading digital experience management solution, Adobe Experience Manager, helps customers organize, create, manage and deliver creative assets and other content across digital marketing channels, including web, mobile, email, communities and video, enabling customers to improve their market and brand perception and provide a personalized experience to their consumers. Adobe Target is a personalization engine that lets our customers test, target and optimize content using machine learning across multiple apps and the web. Adobe Commerce, which integrates with Adobe Experience Manager, enables our customers to create content and promotions for storefronts on every platform and provides a highly customizable and scalable end-to-end platform to manage, personalize and optimize the commerce experience across every touchpoint by bringing together digital commerce, order management and predictive intelligence to enable engaging shopping experiences across B2C and B2B.
• Customer journey management . Our solutions help businesses manage, personalize and orchestrate campaigns and customer journeys across B2E use cases. Adobe Campaign enables marketers to manage the B2C customer journey and use rich customer data to create, coordinate and deliver dynamic, personalized experiences that are synchronized across multiple channels and determined by each consumer’s behaviors and preferences. Marketo Engage is a complete customer experience management solution optimized for B2B, cross-channel campaigns requiring lead management, account-based marketing and revenue attribution technology by bringing together planning, engagement and measurement capabilities into an integrated marketing platform. Our Journey Orchestration service, built on Adobe Experience Platform, enables businesses to tailor individual journeys for every customer based on their previous behavior and preferences.
• Work management . Our work management solution is powered by Workfront, a leading work management platform for marketers. Workfront helps customers orchestrate content creation and campaign workflows across marketing and creative teams.
Adobe acquired Workfront, Inc. on December 7, 2020 and began integrating its work management platform into the Adobe Experience Cloud. Workfront is a configurable cloud platform for enterprise work management that gives teams one central platform to share ideas, create content and manage complex processes.
During the second quarter of fiscal 2020, we began to discontinue our transaction-driven Advertising Cloud offerings, allowing us to focus our investment on strategic growth initiatives. We continue to offer our Advertising Cloud software solutions, but they are not expected to be areas of revenue growth. In the fourth quarter of fiscal 2020, we moved our Advertising Cloud offerings from our Digital Experience segment into our Publishing and Advertising segment, in order to more closely align our Digital Experience business with the strategic growth opportunity.
We believe the AI and machine learning framework enabled by our strategy with Adobe Sensei enhances the delivery of digital experiences. Adobe Experience Cloud offers domain-specific AI services powered by Adobe Sensei that work with Adobe Experience Platform to augment existing Experience Cloud product offerings. These AI services help provide domain-specific intelligence in areas such as attribution and automated insights, customer journey management, lead management, sentiment analysis, one-click personalization, enhanced anomaly detection and more. By building on existing features and these AI-powered services, we believe Adobe Sensei will increase the value we provide our customers and create a competitive differentiation in the market.
Adobe Experience Cloud also offers an open platform and ecosystem through its multi-cloud foundation, the Adobe Experience Platform, AI services powered by Adobe Sensei and developer services through Adobe I/O. Adobe Experience Platform provides the underlying infrastructure to make customer experience management possible by standardizing data into an easily sharable format consumable by Adobe Sensei and provides an open and extensible cloud infrastructure for Adobe Experience Cloud that allows data to flow freely within the Adobe Experience Platform and between Adobe Experience Cloud solutions and third-party software. This open architecture offers scalability with a wide variety of supporting products and
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services, empowers users to quickly develop innovative applications to interact with consumers, and enables a broad industry ecosystem.
To drive growth of Adobe Experience Cloud, we are focused on delivering the best customer experience management solutions for B2E, enterprise and mid-market through our applications, services and platform. We also intend to focus on customer engagement, growing within existing customer accounts, and product differentiation. We have expanded our customers to include Chief Information Officers and are continuing to invest in Adobe Experience Platform integrations with Adobe Analytics and Adobe Audience Manager, as well as new services such as Intelligent Services, Customer Journey Analytics and our Real-time Customer Data Platform, to create a truly comprehensive customer data and insights offering. To give our customers increased flexibility and expand our reach, we are also delivering new functionality through additional services delivered on the Adobe Experience Platform such as Journey Orchestration. We utilize a direct sales force to market and license our Experience Cloud solutions, as well as an extensive ecosystem of partners, including marketing agencies, SIs and ISVs that help license and deploy our solutions to their customers. Strategic partnerships, such as the one we have formed with Microsoft, continue to increase our market reach. We have made significant investments to broaden the scale and size of all of these routes to market and believe these investments will result in continued growth in revenue in our Digital Experience segment in fiscal 2021 and beyond.
Publishing and Advertising
Our Publishing and Advertising segment contains legacy products and services that address diverse market opportunities including eLearning solutions, technical document publishing, web conferencing, document and forms platform, web application development, high-end printing and, starting in the fourth quarter of 2020, our Adobe Advertising Cloud offerings. Graphics professionals and professional publishers continue to require quality, reliability and efficiency in production printing, and our Adobe PostScript and Adobe PDF printing technologies provide advanced functionality to meet the sophisticated requirements of this marketplace. As high-end printing systems evolve and transition to fully digital, composite workflows, we believe we are well positioned to be a supplier of software and technology based on the Adobe PostScript and Adobe PDF standards for use by this industry.
Adobe Advertising Cloud delivers an end-to-end platform for managing advertising across digital formats, and simplifies the delivery of video, display and search advertising across channels and screens.
We generate revenue in our legacy Publishing products and services by licensing our technology to OEMs that manufacture workflow software, printers and other output devices, and generate revenue in Advertising through usage-based offerings.
COMPETITION
The markets for our products and services are characterized by intense competition, new industry standards, evolving distribution models, disruptive technology developments, frequent product introductions, short product life cycles, price cutting with resulting downward pressure on gross margins and price sensitivity on the part of consumers. Our future success will depend on our ability to enhance and better integrate our existing products, introduce new products on a timely and cost-effective basis, meet changing customer needs, provide best-in-class information security to build customer confidence and combat cyber-attacks, extend our core technology into new applications and anticipate emerging standards, business models, software delivery methods and other technological changes.
Digital Media
No single company has offerings that match the capabilities of our Adobe Creative Cloud products and services, but we face collective competition from a variety of point offerings, free products and downloadable apps. Our competition includes offerings from companies such as Apple, Autodesk, Avid, Corel, Microsoft, Affinity and others, as well as from many lower-end offerings. We believe our greatest advantage in this space is the performance and scope of our integrated solutions, which work together as part of Creative Cloud. With Creative Cloud, we compete favorably on the basis of features and functionality, ease of use, product reliability, value and performance characteristics.
Professional digital imaging, drawing and illustration products are characterized by feature-rich competition, brand awareness and price sensitivity. Competition in this space is also emerging with drawing and illustration applications on tablet and smartphone platforms. The demand for professional web page layout and professional web content creation tools is constantly evolving and highly volatile. In this area, we face direct and indirect competition from desktop software companies and various proprietary and open source web-authoring tools.
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We face competition from device, hardware and camera manufacturers as they try to differentiate their offerings by bundling, for free, their own digital imaging software or those of our competitors. Similarly, we face potential competition from operating system manufacturers as they integrate or offer hobbyist-level digital imaging and image management features with their operating systems. We also face competition from smartphone and tablet manufacturers that integrate imaging and video software into their devices to work with cameras that come as part of their smartphone and tablet offerings. In addition, social networking platforms such as Facebook (including Instagram), Snapchat, Twitter, TikTok and Pinterest are yet another direct means to post, edit and share digital media, allowing users to edit content directly on their platforms and apps without the use of tailored software for editing images and videos. Our software also faces competition from free or low-cost storage and synchronization products that encourage consumers to use their integrated image and video editing solutions.
In addition, the needs of digital imaging and video editing software users are constantly evolving due to rapid technology and hardware advancements in digital cameras, digital video cameras, printers, personal computers, tablets, smartphones and other new devices. Our imaging and video offerings, including Photoshop, Lightroom, After Effects, Premiere Pro and Premiere Rush, face competition from established and emerging companies offering similar products.
With the ubiquity of mobile devices and tablets, there is a growing number of image editing applications that are lightweight and mobile-first with features that compete with our professional tools. Our consumer digital imaging and video editing offerings are subject to intense competition, including customer price sensitivity and competitor brand awareness. We face direct and indirect competition in the consumer digital imaging space from a number of companies whose mobile and tablet apps compete with our offerings.
Applications and tools for experience and interface design and prototyping are still emerging and evolving as adoption of these tools by designers, design teams and larger organizations grows. Competitors to Adobe XD include Figma, InVision and Sketch. Partnerships and integrations between these companies and third parties create an increasingly competitive landscape in this space.
The universe of applications for 3D texturing and material authoring as well as other applications and tools in the areas of 3D, augmented reality and immersive design are still developing and advancing as adoption grows and new use cases emerge. Adobe’s Substance suite of applications and Adobe Aero face competition from both hardware and software players in these nascent fields and competitors include Autodesk, C4D, Foundry, Quixel and Unity.
The stock content marketplace has significant competition, especially in the microstock segment, where Adobe primarily operates today with our Adobe Stock offering. Key competitors in this segment include Shutterstock, Getty Images and a number of smaller companies. Deep product integration with Adobe Creative Cloud and superior reach and relationships with creative professionals around the world differentiate our Adobe Stock offerings.
The nature of traditional digital document creation, storage, collaboration and signing has been rapidly evolving as knowledge workers, communicators and consumers increasingly shift their behavior to non-desktop workflows. Competitors like Microsoft, Google, Box, Dropbox and DocuSign all offer competitive alternatives to our Adobe Document Cloud business for creating and managing PDFs and e-signatures. In addition, other PDF creation solutions can be found at a low cost or for free on the web or via mobile applications. To address these competitive threats, we are working to ensure our Document Cloud applications stay at the forefront of innovation in emerging opportunities such as PDF document generation, document collaboration and document security, document workflow management, easeful software integrations, enablement of paper to digital transformations, and accessibility and usability on multiple devices, including mobile and desktop.
Digital Experience
The markets in which our Digital Experience business unit competes are growing rapidly and characterized by intense competition. Our Adobe Experience Cloud solutions face competition from large companies such as Google, Oracle, salesforce.com, SAP, SAS, Shopify, Sitecore, BigCommerce and others, in addition to point product solutions and focused competitors. Additionally, new competitors are constantly entering these markets. Some of these competitors provide SaaS solutions to customers, generally through a web browser, while others provide software that is installed by customers directly on their servers. In addition, we compete at times with our customers’ or potential customers’ internally-developed applications. Of the competitors listed above, no single company has products identical in breadth and depth to our Adobe Experience Cloud offerings. Adobe Experience Cloud competes in a variety of areas, including reporting and analytics, cross-channel marketing and optimization, online marketing, audience management, marketing automation, customer data platforms, digital commerce enablement, order management, web experience management, customer experience management and others.
Large software, internet and database management companies have expanded their offerings in the digital experience area, either by developing competing services or by acquiring existing competitors or strategic partners of ours. We believe competitive factors in our markets include the proven performance, security, scalability, flexibility and reliability of services;
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the strategic relationships and integration with third-party applications; the intuitiveness and visual appeal of user interfaces; demonstrable cost-effective benefits to customers; pricing; the flexibility of services to match changing business demands; enterprise-level customer service and training; perceived market leadership; the usability of services; real-time data and reporting; independence from portals and search engines; the ability to deploy the services globally; and success in educating customers in how to utilize services effectively. We believe we compete favorably with both the enterprise and low-cost alternatives based on many of these competitive factors including our strong feature set, the breadth of our offerings, our focus on global, multi-brand companies, our superior user experience, tools for building multi-screen, cross-channel applications, standards-based architecture, scalability and performance and leadership in industry standards efforts.
Creative and digital agencies, as well as SIs, are increasingly investing in acquiring their own digital experience technology to complement their creative services offerings. Adobe may face competition from these agencies and SIs as they come to market with best-of-breed offerings in one or more digital experience capabilities, or if agencies attempt to create a more complete technology platform offering. We believe our creative tools heritage differentiates us from our competitors. We have worked closely with marketing and creative customers for over 30 years. We also believe we have leadership in this space, with current customers representing leading global brands. Our comprehensive solutions extend more broadly than any other company in serving the needs of marketers and addressing this market opportunity; we integrate content and data, analytics, personalization, digital experience management, marketing automation, cross-channel campaign management, digital commerce, audience management and customer intelligence in our Adobe Experience Cloud enabled by the Adobe Experience Platform. Most importantly, we provide a vision for our Digital Experience customers as we engage with them across the important aspects of their business, extending from their use of Adobe Creative Cloud and Adobe Document Cloud to how they manage, deliver, measure and monetize their content, participate in digital commerce, and create highly personalized and engaging shoppable experiences with our Experience Cloud.
Publishing and Advertising
Our Publishing and Advertising product offerings face competition from large-scale publishing systems, XML-based publishing companies, as well as lower-end desktop publishing products. Similarly, our web conferencing product faces competition from a number of established products from other companies, including Cisco, Citrix and Microsoft. Competition involves a number of factors, including product features, ease-of-use, printer service support, the level of customization and integration with other publishing system components, the number of hardware platforms supported, service and price. We believe we can successfully compete based upon the quality and features of our products, our strong brand among users, the widespread adoption of our products among printer service bureaus, and our extensive application programming interfaces.
In printing technologies, we believe the principal competitive factors for OEMs in selecting a page description language or a printing technology are product capabilities, market leadership, reliability, price, support and engineering development assistance. We believe that our competitive advantages include our technology competency, OEM customer relationships and our intellectual property portfolio.
Our Advertising Cloud offerings face competition from other advertising platforms and networks, including Google, Facebook and The Trade Desk.
PRINCIPAL PRODUCTS AND SERVICES
Digital Media Offerings
Creative Cloud
Adobe Creative Cloud is a cloud-based subscription offering that enables creative professionals and enthusiasts alike to express themselves with apps and services for video, design, photography and the web that connect across devices, platforms and geographies. Members have access to a vibrant creative community, publishing services to deliver apps and websites, cloud storage to easily sync and access their work, files and assets across apps, platforms and devices using Creative Cloud Libraries, collaboration capabilities with team members, and new products and exclusive updates as they are developed. Creative Cloud members can build a Creative Profile which persists wherever they are. A user’s Creative Profile moves with them via Creative Cloud services from app to app and device to device, giving them immediate access to their personal files, photos, brushes, graphics, colors, fonts, text styles, desktop setting customizations and other important assets. All of the applications listed below and many more are available through subscriptions to Creative Cloud.
Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Lightroom
Adobe Photoshop is the world’s most advanced digital imaging and design app. It is used by photographers, designers, animators, web professionals and video professionals, and is available to Adobe Creative Cloud subscribers on both desktop and iPad. Lightroom, our cloud-based photo service for editing, organizing, storing and sharing photos, is also available to
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Creative Cloud subscribers on desktop, tablet and mobile devices. Customers can also subscribe to Photoshop or Lightroom as individual cloud-enabled subscription products, or through our Photography Plan, which is a cloud-enabled offering targeted at photographers and photo hobbyists and includes Photoshop, Lightroom, integrated cloud services, and Lightroom Classic, a desktop-only version of the photo service app. For smartphone users looking for fast and powerful photo editing, we offer Photoshop Express, which enables sophisticated photo editing and content creation using a touch-based interface on mobile devices.
Adobe Illustrator
Adobe Illustrator is our industry-standard vector graphics app for desktop and iPad used worldwide by designers of all types who want to create digital graphics and illustrations from web icons and product packaging to book illustrations and billboards, and for all kinds of media: print, web, interactive, video and mobile. New features powered by Adobe Sensei AI allow users to automatically extract colors from a photo and add them to their designs, auto-trace a hand-drawn sketch to turn it into a vector graphic, and more. Illustrator is available on desktop and iPad to Creative Cloud subscribers, and customers can also subscribe to use it as an individual subscription product.
Adobe Fresco
Adobe Fresco is an illustration app designed for the latest stylus and touch devices that brings together the world’s largest collection of vector and raster brushes, and revolutionary new Live Brushes, to deliver a natural painting and drawing experience for artists, illustrators, animators, sketchers and anyone who wants to discover, or rediscover, the joy of drawing and painting. Live Brushes, powered by Adobe Sensei, are designed to look, feel and act just like real watercolors that blossom, blend and bleed in real time or oil that can be swirled and smudged on canvas. Tight integration with Adobe Creative Cloud enables customers to start their projects on tablet devices and move seamlessly to desktop or mobile, with all files, brushes, fonts and assets synced across devices through Adobe Creative Cloud. A free version of Adobe Fresco is available and a premium version is offered as part of Adobe Creative Cloud, as part of an Adobe Photoshop subscription plan, or as a standalone subscription for individuals, teams, education or enterprises. Adobe Fresco is available for iPad, iPhone, Microsoft Surface computers and Wacom Mobile Studio devices.
Adobe InDesign
Adobe InDesign is the industry-leading design and layout app for print and digital media. Our customers use it to create, preflight and publish a broad range of content including newspapers and magazines for print, online and tablet app delivery. From stationery, fliers and posters to brochures, annual reports, magazines and books with professional layout and typesetting tools, customers can create multicolumn pages that feature stylish typography and rich graphics, images and tables. Tight integration with other Adobe offerings such as Photoshop, Illustrator and Acrobat enables customers to work productively in print and digital workflows. InDesign integrates seamlessly with Adobe InCopy, so customers can work on layouts simultaneously with writers and editors. Customers can also access Adobe digital publishing capabilities from within InDesign to create and publish engaging apps for a broad range of devices, including iOS, Android and Amazon-based devices. InDesign is available to Adobe Creative Cloud subscribers, and customers can also subscribe to use InDesign as an individual cloud-enabled subscription product.
Adobe XD
Adobe XD is our all-in-one experience design (XD) solution used to build user experiences (UX) and user interfaces (UI) when designing websites, mobile apps and more; Adobe XD enables users to go from concept to prototype faster. Adobe XD brings design and prototyping together with fast, intuitive tools that deliver precision and performance using timesaving features like Responsive Resize, Repeat Grid, Auto-Animate and flexible artboards to create everything from low-fidelity wireframes to fully interactive prototypes for any size screen in minutes. Adobe XD also makes it easy to, with a single click, share and collaborate on designs and prototypes with teammates and allow multiple colleagues on multiple devices to simultaneously make changes to the same document in real time, with support for version control. Adobe XD allows designers to design, prototype and share digital experiences that extend beyond the screen, including keyboard and gamepad triggers for desktop and console-based experiences, and voice prototyping to create audio interactions for voice-based smart assistants and other similar platforms. Adobe XD also enables users to share and reuse assets with design systems that can scale as teams and organizations grow. Adobe XD is available to Adobe Creative Cloud subscribers, and individuals and teams can also subscribe to use it as an individual cloud-enabled subscription product. A free version is also available.
Adobe Premiere Pro and Adobe Premiere Rush
Adobe Premiere Pro is a leading nonlinear video editing tool used by filmmakers, TV editors, YouTubers and videographers. Customers can import and combine various types of media, from video shot on a smartphone to 8K to virtual reality, and then edit in its native format without transcoding. Premiere Pro supports a vast majority of formats, and customers
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can use multiple graphics cards to accelerate render and export times. Premiere Pro also lets users have multiple projects open while simultaneously collaborating on a single project with their team. Automated tools powered by Adobe Sensei like Auto-Reframe save time and workflows for color, graphics, audio and immersive 360/VR in Premiere Pro take customers from first edit to final credits faster than ever. Adobe Premiere Rush is an all-in-one, easy-to-use video editing app that simplifies video creation and sharing on platforms including YouTube and Instagram, while delivering professional quality video results. Premiere Rush is uniquely positioned toward social media marketers, video bloggers and video enthusiasts who are looking for an all-in-one app to create and directly share online videos. Premiere Pro and Premiere Rush tightly integrate with other Adobe creative applications and are available to Adobe Creative Cloud subscribers, and customers can also subscribe to use Premiere Pro and Premiere Rush as individual cloud-enabled subscription products, or they can download the free Premiere Rush starter plan.
Adobe After Effects
Adobe After Effects is our industry-standard motion graphics and visual effects app used by a wide variety of animators, designers and compositors to create cinematic movie titles, remove objects from videos, apply countless effects and create animations. It offers superior control, a wealth of creative options and integration with other post-production applications. After Effects works together seamlessly with other Adobe apps such as Premiere Pro, Photoshop, Illustrator, Adobe XD and Adobe Audition. After Effects is available to Adobe Creative Cloud subscribers, and customers can also subscribe to use it as an individual cloud-enabled subscription product.
Adobe Dimension
Adobe Dimension is designed to make it easy for graphic designers to compose, adjust and render high-quality, photorealistic 3D images. Users can composite 2D and 3D assets to create product shots, craft photorealistic scenes and visualize branding, packaging and logo designs in 3D with photorealistic renderings. Dimension integrates well with other Adobe apps. Users can drag and drop background images from Photoshop, geometry from Substance Painter and 3D models from Adobe Stock, all without leaving Dimension. Dimension is available to Adobe Creative Cloud subscribers, and customers can also subscribe to use it as an individual cloud-enabled subscription product.
Adobe Aero
Adobe Aero is our free iOS application for viewing, building and sharing immersive and interactive augmented reality experiences. Users can create augmented reality experiences using 2D and 3D assets created in other Adobe applications like Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Dimension and Substance by Adobe, as well as third-party applications like Cinema4D, and bring them to life with animations and interactive triggers. Adobe Aero automatically optimizes these assets for augmented reality and uses machine learning technology to mimic real-world lighting on objects without the need for complex models or time-consuming manual rendering. Adobe Aero is available for free on the iOS App Store.
Substance by Adobe
Substance by Adobe is a suite of tools, comprised of Substance Painter, Substance Source, Substance Alchemist and Substance Designer, for 3D texturing and materials authoring that enables users to get all the details just right in their 3D creations. Substance Painter allows users to nondestructively paint 3D textures on models in real time with smart materials that adjust to any object to show realistic wear and tear. Substance Source is a 3D materials library from which users can import professional quality 3D textures into their projects and generate infinite texture variations. Substance Alchemist allows users to create collections of 3D textures and materials, mix and tweak existing materials and even create new materials from the real world using photographs and high-resolution scans. Substance Designer is the industry standard texture authoring tool for precisely creating custom materials with complete nondestructive authoring control. Substance integrates well with other Adobe apps like Dimension, as well as game engines like Epic Games’ Unreal Engine 4, Unity, Autodesk’s Maya and 3ds Max and more. Customers can also subscribe to use Substance as an individual subscription product.
Photoshop Camera
Photoshop Camera is our new, free, AI-driven mobile camera application powered by Adobe Sensei that understands and suggests the best unique Photoshop lenses and camera effects for your photos right inside the camera. Users can scroll through AI-powered lenses and camera effects to apply to photos before or after taking a photo, and share or post photos to social media platforms direct from the application. Photoshop Camera is available for free on the iOS App Store and Google Play store.
Adobe Stock
Adobe Stock provides designers and businesses with access to millions of high-quality, curated, royalty-free photos, vectors, illustrations, videos, templates and 3D assets, for all their creative projects. Adobe Stock is built into Adobe Creative
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Cloud apps, including Photoshop , Illustrator and InDesign, enabling users to search, browse and add images to their Creative Cloud Libraries, and obtain instant access to assets across desktop and mobile devices. Adobe Stock assets may be licensed directly within the Creative Cloud desktop apps, through stock.adobe.com or as a multi-asset subscription.
Adobe Fonts
Adobe Fonts brings thousands of fonts from foundry partners into one library for quick browsing, easy use on the web or on the user’s desktop and endless typographic inspiration. Our full library of commercially-licensed fonts is offered through Adobe Creative Cloud. In addition, customers may subscribe to the standalone Adobe Fonts portfolio plan, or license individual fonts from the Adobe Fonts Marketplace.
Behance
Behance is the leading social community for creators to showcase and discover creative work online, and live-stream their skills and creations from Creative Cloud applications. Adobe Portfolio allows users to quickly and simply build a fully-customizable and hosted website that seamlessly syncs with Behance.
Adobe Spark
Adobe Spark is our integrated web and mobile software for creating and sharing impactful visual stories. Designed for everyday communication, Adobe Spark empowers users to transform text, photos and videos into dynamic web stories, video stories or professional-looking graphics for social media that engage audiences across multiple channels and on any device. The Adobe Spark web app seamlessly syncs with the Spark Post, Spark Page and Spark Video iOS mobile apps (with Spark Post also available as an Android app), allowing users to create, edit and share their story from any location regardless of their design experience. Adobe Spark with premium features allows users to apply custom branding to their creations. The premium product is offered as part of any Adobe Creative Cloud plan or as a standalone subscription for individuals, teams, education or enterprises. A free version is also available.
Acrobat and Adobe Document Cloud
Adobe Document Cloud is a cloud-based subscription offering that enables complete, reliable and automated digital document and signature workflows across desktop, mobile, web and third-party enterprise applications to drive business productivity for individuals, teams, small businesses and enterprises. With Document Cloud, users can create, review, approve, sign and track documents, and store them in Document Cloud for easy access and sharing, whether on a desktop or mobile device. Document Cloud includes Adobe Acrobat DC, Adobe Sign, Adobe Scan and other Document Cloud apps and services that work standalone or integrate with users’ existing productivity apps, processes and systems.
At the heart of Adobe Document Cloud is Adobe Acrobat DC, the industry standard for creating, converting and editing PDFs. Acrobat enables users to create secure, reliable and compact Adobe PDF documents from authoring applications such as Microsoft Office software, graphics applications and more. Acrobat enables automated collaborative workflows with a rich set of commenting tools and review tracking features, and includes everything needed to create and distribute rich, secure digital documents that can be viewed easily within leading web browsers or on computer desktops via the free Adobe Acrobat Reader.
Adobe Acrobat is available to both Adobe Creative Cloud and Adobe Document Cloud subscribers. Customers can also license Acrobat Pro DC or Acrobat Standard DC (which has a subset of Acrobat Pro DC features) as individual point products available through a cloud-enabled subscription. Adobe Acrobat Reader, our free software for reliable viewing, annotating and printing of Adobe PDF documents on a variety of desktop and mobile platforms, offers additional features for subscribers to Adobe Document Cloud or Adobe Acrobat DC that enables subscribers to create, edit, export, combine, share and collaborate on PDF documents on mobile devices, including the new “Liquid Mode” feature that automatically reformats text, images and tables for quick navigation and consumption on smaller screens. Users of both Acrobat and Acrobat Reader can also access, edit and save changes to their PDF files stored in the Adobe Document Cloud, or other third-party cloud storage services, including Box, Dropbox, Google Drive and Microsoft OneDrive.
Adobe Scan can be used for free on mobile devices to provide scanning capabilities in the pocket of every person. It captures paper documents as images and transforms them into full-featured and versatile PDFs via Adobe Document Cloud services for instant sharing with others.
Our Adobe Sign cloud-based e-signature service allows users to securely electronically send and sign any document from any device. As well as being available on the web, Adobe Sign has a mobile app for iOS and Android that enables users to e-sign documents and forms, send them for signature, track responses in real time and obtain instant signatures with in-person signing. Adobe Sign also integrates with users’ enterprise systems through a comprehensive set of application programming interfaces, and Adobe Experience Manager Forms and Advanced Workflows for Adobe Sign, to create forms and provide
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seamless experiences to customers across web and mobile sites. Adobe Sign is Microsoft’s preferred e-sign solution and is integrated into Microsoft Office 365, Microsoft Dynamics 365, Microsoft SharePoint and Microsoft Teams.
Digital Experience Offerings
Adobe Experience Cloud is a comprehensive collection of best-in-class solutions for analytics, marketing and commerce, all integrated on a cloud platform, along with service, support and an open ecosystem. Experience Cloud is comprised of the following sets of solutions for our customers: Customer Data and Insights, Content and Commerce, and Customer Journey Management, which are each described below.
Customer Data and Insights
Our Customer Data and Insights solutions deliver real-time customer profiles and intelligence across the customer journey with a unified, purpose-built platform for customer experience management, a data management platform and cross-channel analytics. The following is a brief description of our solutions for Customer Data and Insights.
Adobe Experience Platform
Adobe Experience Platform is the industry’s first purpose-built platform for customer experience management that helps users ingest, process and stitch together known and unknown customer data from every customer interaction across multiple channels in real time into robust unified customer profiles. Adobe Experience Platform standardizes data into an easily sharable format consumable by Adobe Sensei and provides an open and extensible cloud infrastructure which allows that data to flow freely within the Adobe Experience Platform and between Adobe applications and services and third-party software. This open architecture offers scalability with a wide variety of supporting products and services, empowers users to quickly develop innovative applications to interact with consumers and enables a broad industry ecosystem. Adobe Experience Platform also offers Query Service and Data Science Workspace, which enable users to gain deeper insights from stored datasets, and customer journey intelligence, which leverages predefined data-driven operational best practices, AI and business intelligence to enable and optimize real-time decisions, actions and business processes. Users are able to leverage Adobe Experience Platform to activate AI-driven insights across all Adobe Experience Cloud applications.
Adobe Analytics
Adobe Analytics is our industry leading solution that helps our customers create a holistic view of their business by turning consumer interactions into actionable insights. Adobe Analytics enables web, social, video, mobile, attribution and predictive analytics to continuously improve the performance of marketing activities and better direct our customers’ marketing spend. Adobe Analytics welcomes data from virtually any channel, bringing all data under one roof to deliver real-time insights based on true 360-degree customer views. From attribution and predictive modeling to contribution analysis and propensity scoring, Adobe Analytics is immersed in machine learning and AI. With intuitive and interactive dashboards and reports, our customers can sift, sort and share real-time information to provide insights that can be used to identify problems and opportunities and to drive conversion and relevant consumer experiences. Our Analysis Workspace provides a robust, flexible canvas for creating and curating reusable analysis projects that are customized to their needs. Adobe Analytics lets users capture, analyze and integrate data from virtually any source, both online and offline, from web, email and CRM to voice, IoT and connected car data.
Adobe Audience Manager
Adobe Audience Manager is a data management platform that helps digital publishers build unique audience profiles to identify the most valuable segments and use them across any digital channel. Adobe Audience Manager consolidates audience information from all available sources. It then identifies, quantifies and optimizes high-value target audiences, which can then be offered to advertisers via an integrated, secure, privacy-friendly management system that works across all advertising distribution platforms. Adobe Audience Manager provides access to multiple data sources, offering digital publishers the ability to use a wide variety of third-party data as well as Audience Manager’s private data co-op.
Customer Journey Analytics
Our Customer Journey Analytics service, built on Adobe Experience Platform, brings a powerful set of analytics tools that stitch and analyze cross-channel data into a single interface to deliver comprehensive customer journey insights that allow our customers to more easily deliver consistent experiences regardless of channel. This service provides brands viewing data across channels with an easy, interactive way to dig deeper and uncover new insights with omnichannel data analysis, while making analytics and data science insights more accessible across their organization. The Customer Journey Analytics interface democratizes data analysis by allowing anyone in an organization to creatively and intelligently visualize customers’ journeys and gather collections of insights for different audiences in real time by manipulating layers of data.
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Real-Time Customer Data Platform
Our Real-time Customer Data Platform, built on Adobe Experience Platform, uses customer data to instantly personalize experiences. It does so by activating Adobe Experience Platform’s unified customer profiles across channels to leverage intelligent decision making throughout the customer journey and deliver hyper-personalized experiences across all known channels and devices. The Real-time Customer Data Platform utilizes an open and extensible architecture that allows integration with a variety of data sources and activation touchpoints and provides continuous data refreshes to keep customer profiles updated in real time.
Intelligent Services
Our Intelligent Services, built on Adobe Experience Platform, give marketers responsible for customer experience access to AI-as-a-service, allowing anyone to predict customer behavior, measure the impact of a campaign, or understand which marketing activities produce the best returns. It provides customers an advanced look at each of their customers, so they can know who is most likely to respond to a message, and then deliver an experience tailored to their preferences in real time. It enables business to understand the reasoning behind customer behaviors, how each customer interaction impacts business outcomes, and which marketing activities produce the best returns.
Content and Commerce
Our Content and Commerce solutions help customers manage, deliver, test, target and optimize content delivery and enable shopping experiences that scale from mid-market to enterprise businesses. The following is a brief description of our solutions for Content and Commerce.
Adobe Experience Manager
Adobe Experience Manager is a leading digital, cloud-native experience management solution that uses AI tools to help customers organize, create and manage the delivery of creative assets and other content across digital engagement channels, including web, mobile, email, communities and video. It enables customers to manage content on premises or in the cloud with our cloud-native enterprise-grade content management system, delivering agile and rapid deployment. With this ultimate control of content and campaigns, our customers can deliver real-time and personalized experiences to their consumers that help build customers’ brands, drive demand and extend reach. Adobe Experience Manager includes digital asset management, content management and enterprise-level forms management. These tools enable customers to improve their market and brand perception and provide a personalized experience to their consumers.
Adobe Target
Adobe Target is a personalization engine that lets our customers test, target and optimize content using machine learning across multiple apps and the web. With Adobe Target, our customers have the tools they need to test every piece of content through virtually every channel so they can quickly discover what gets noticed and what increases conversion and engagement. It paves a path from simple testing to targeting to true segmentation and optimization through A/B and multivariate testing, AI-powered automation at scale, content targeting and automated decision making. Adobe Target capabilities also enable our customers to test and target adaptive or responsive mobile web experiences.
Adobe Commerce
Adobe Commerce offers digital commerce enablement and order orchestration for both physical and digital goods across a range of industries, including consumer packaged goods, retail, wholesale, manufacturing and the public sector. Adobe Commerce brings together digital commerce, order management and predictive intelligence together with a modern, user-friendly drag-and-drop interface to create shopping experiences that scale from mid-market to enterprise businesses. Based on an open-source ecosystem with thousands of third-party extensions, Adobe Commerce extends beyond the web shopping cart to shoppable experiences, including email, mobile, in-store and marketplaces. Adobe Commerce also integrates with Adobe Experience Manager to enable the user-friendly creation and deployment of content and promotions for shopping experiences that integrate seamlessly across mobile, social or in-store.
Customer Journey Management
Our Customer Journey Management solutions enable our customers to manage and orchestrate individual cross-channel campaigns that encourage meaningful customer experiences; personalize content and deliver optimized experiences at scale that are meaningful to each of their customers; and plan, orchestrate and measure engagement with their prospects and customers at every stage of the customer journey, across B2E use cases. The following is a brief description of our solutions for Customer Journey Management.
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Adobe Campaign
Adobe Campaign is optimized for B2C experiences involving high volume email and cross-channel campaign management. Adobe Campaign enables marketers to manage the customer journey and use rich customer data to create, coordinate and deliver dynamic, personalized experiences that are synchronized across multiple channels, including email, mobile and offline, and determined by each consumer’s behaviors and preferences. As part of its feature set, Adobe Campaign provides visual campaign orchestration, allowing for intuitive design and automated consumer experiences across channels, from one-off campaigns to triggered messages, with a graphically rich interface. Marketers can also integrate consumer data from across marketing channels to develop and deliver more relevant marketing experiences to their consumers through email, mobile, offline channels and more. Features also include targeted segmentation, multilingual email execution, real-time interaction, in-app messaging and operational reporting to easily see how well campaigns are performing.
Marketo Engage
Marketo Engage is a complete customer experience management solution optimized for B2B, cross-channel campaigns requiring lead management, account-based marketing and revenue attribution technology by bringing together planning, engagement and measurement capabilities into an integrated marketing platform. Marketo Engage simplifies how companies plan, orchestrate and measure engagement with prospects and customers at every stage of their experience and allows companies to better align marketing and sales at every touchpoint to engage high priority accounts. It offers a feature-rich and cloud-native platform with a set of solutions for delivering transformative customer experiences across industries and companies of all sizes.
Journey Orchestration
Our Journey Orchestration service, built on Adobe Experience Platform, enables businesses to design, orchestrate and measure event-driven, customer-led journeys across the entire customer lifecycle at the individual level to intelligently anticipate their needs across their personal journey. It allows businesses to trigger individual journeys, apply conditions in real time to qualify events and personalize journeys, as well as visually map individual journeys across systems in an intuitive workflow-based interface. Journey Orchestration also allows businesses to track detailed performance of executed journeys and how individuals are progressing in real time, with data automatically sent to Adobe Experience Platform to allow full-funnel analysis.
Other Products and Services
We also offer a broad range of other enterprise and digital media products and services. Information about other products not referenced here can be found on our corporate website, www.adobe.com.
OPERATIONS
Marketing and Sales
We market and license our products directly using our sales force and certain local offices and through our own website at www.adobe.com. We also market and distribute our products through sales channels, which include distributors, retailers, software developers, SIs, ISVs and VARs, as well as through OEM and hardware bundle customers.
Our local field offices include locations in Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, China, Denmark, France, Germany, Hong Kong, India, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Moldova, the Netherlands, Poland, Romania, Singapore, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, the United Kingdom and the United States.
We sell the majority of our products through a software subscription model where our customers purchase access to a product for a specific period of time during which they always have rights to use the most recent version of that product. We also license perpetual versions of our software with maintenance and support, which includes rights to upgrades, when and if available, support, updates and enhancements.
For fiscal 2020, 2019 and 2018, there were no customers that represented at least 10% of net revenue. As of fiscal year end 2020 and 2019, no single customer was responsible for over 10% of our trade receivables.
Services and Support
We provide expert consulting, customer success management, technical support and learning services across all our customer segments, including enterprises, small and medium businesses, creative professionals and consumers. With a focus on ensuring sustained customer success and realized value, this comprehensive portfolio of services is designed to help customers
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and partners maximize the return on their investments in our cloud solutions and licensed products. Our service and support revenue consists primarily of consulting fees, software maintenance, technical support fees and training fees.
Consulting Services
We have a global professional services team dedicated to designing and implementing solutions for our largest customers. Our professional services team uses a comprehensive, customer-focused methodology that has been refined over years of capturing and analyzing best practices from numerous customer engagements across a diverse mix of solutions, industries and customer segments. Our customers continually seek to integrate across Adobe’s products and cloud solutions, and engage our professional services teams to share their expertise in leading customers’ digital strategies, multi-solution integrations and in running customer platforms. Using our methodology, our professional services teams are able to accelerate customers’ time to value, and maximize the return customers earn on their investment in Adobe solutions.
A key component of Adobe’s strategy is developing a large partner ecosystem to expand the reach and breadth of Adobe solutions in the global marketplace. In order to assist partners in building their respective digital practices, Adobe Global Services provides a comprehensive set of deliverables through Adobe’s Solution Partner Program. The breadth of services described in the program provides system integrators, agencies and regional partners the tools required to develop core capabilities for positioning and building with Adobe technology, as well as implementing and running customer platforms. We believe that through these programmatic services and support, our joint customers benefit greatly from the combination of Adobe technology and the deep customer context that our global partners represent.
Customer Success Account Management
Adobe Customer Solutions provides Customer Success Managers, who work with enterprise and commercial customers on an ongoing basis to understand their current and future business needs, promote faster solution adoption, and align product capabilities to customers’ business objectives to maximize the return on their investment in Adobe’s offerings. We engage customers to share innovative best practices, relevant industry and vertical knowledge, and proven success strategies based on our extensive engagements with leading marketers and brands. The performance of these teams is directly associated with customer-focused outcomes.
Technical Support
Adobe provides enterprise maintenance and support services to customers of subscription products as part of the subscription entitlement, and to perpetual license customers via annual fee-based maintenance and support programs. These offerings provide:
• technical support on the products they have purchased from Adobe;
• “how to” help in using our products; and
• product upgrades and enhancements during the term of the maintenance and support or subscription period, which is typically one to three years.
We provide product support through a global support organization that includes several regional and global support centers, supplemented with outsourced vendors for specific services. Customers can seek help through multiple channels including phone, chat, web, social media and email, allowing quick and easy access to the information they need. These teams are responsible for providing timely, high-quality technical expertise on all our products.
Certain consumers are eligible to receive Getting Started support, to assist with easy adoption of their products. Support for some products and in some countries may vary. For enterprise customers with greater support needs, we offer personalized service options through Premium Services options, delivered by global support centers and technical account managers who can also provide proactive risk mitigation services and on-site support services for those with business-critical deployments.
Lastly, we also offer delivery assurance, technical support and enablement services to partners and developer organizations. Through the Adobe Partner Connection Reseller Program, we provide developers with high-quality tools, software development kits, information and services.
Digital Learning Services
Adobe Customer Solutions offers a comprehensive portfolio of learning and enablement services to assist our customer and partner teams in the use of our products, including those within Digital Experience, Digital Media and other legacy products and solutions. Our training portfolio includes a large number of free online self-service learning options on
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www.training.adobe.com. Adobe Digital Learning Services also has an extensive portfolio of fee-based learning programs including a wide range of traditional classroom, virtual and on-demand training and certifications delivered by our team of training professionals and partners across the globe.
These core offerings are complemented by our custom learning services, which support our largest enterprise customers and their unique requirements. Solution-specific skills assessments help our enterprise customers objectively assess the knowledge and competencies within their marketing teams and tailor their learning priorities accordingly. Finally, aligned with our cloud strategy, we have introduced a new learning subscription service that enables customers to access both business and technical Digital Experience training over a 12-month period, which is a scalable approach to supporting long-term learning.
Investments
From time to time we make direct investments in privately held companies. We enter into these investments with the intent of securing financial returns as well as for strategic purposes, as they often increase our knowledge of emerging markets and technologies and expand our opportunities to provide Adobe products and services.
PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT
A continuous high level of investment is required for the enhancement of existing solutions and the development of new solutions due to the speed of technological change that characterizes the software industry. We develop our software internally, as well as acquire products or technology developed by others by purchasing the stock or assets of the business entity that owns the technology. In other instances, we have licensed or purchased the intellectual property ownership rights of programs developed by others with license or technology transfer agreements that may obligate us to pay a flat license fee or royalties, typically based on a dollar amount per unit or a percentage of the revenue generated by those programs.
PROTECTING AND LICENSING OUR PRODUCTS
We protect our intellectual property through a combination of patents, copyrights, trademarks and trade secrets, foreign intellectual property laws, confidentiality procedures and contractual provisions. We have United States and foreign patents and pending applications that relate to various aspects of our products and technology. Although our patents have value, no single patent is essential to any of our principal businesses. We have also registered, and applied for the registration of, U.S. and international trademarks, service marks, domain names and copyrights.
Our enterprise customers license our hosted offerings as SaaS or Managed Services, and consumers primarily use our desktop software and mobile apps. We license our desktop software to users under ‘click through’ or signed license agreements containing restrictions on duplication, disclosure and transfer. Similarly, cloud products and services are provided to users under ‘click through’ or signed agreements containing restrictions on access and use.
Despite our efforts to protect our proprietary technology and our intellectual property rights, unauthorized parties may attempt to copy or obtain and use our technology to develop applications with the same functionality as our application. Policing unauthorized use of our technology and intellectual property rights is difficult. We believe that our transition from perpetual-use software licenses to a subscription-based business model combined with the increased focus on cloud-based computing has and may continue to improve our efforts to combat the pirating of our products.
HUMAN CAPITAL
Our values — genuine, innovative, involved and exceptional — are built on the foundation that our people and the way we treat one another promote creativity, innovation and productivity, which spur the company’s success. We are continually investing in our global workforce to further drive diversity and inclusion, provide fair and market-competitive pay and benefits to support our employees’ well-being, and foster their growth and development. As of November 27, 2020, we employed 22,516 people, of which approximately 52% were in the United States and 48% were in our international locations. During fiscal 2020, our total attrition rate was less than 9%. We have not experienced work stoppages and believe our employee relations are good.
We encourage you to visit our website for more detailed information regarding our Human Capital programs and initiatives. Nothing on our website shall be deemed incorporated by reference into this Annual Report on Form 10-K.
Diversity and Inclusion
Adobe For All is our vision to advance diversity and inclusion across the company. We recognize that everyone deserves respect and equal treatment, regardless of gender, race, ethnicity, age, disability, sexual orientation, gender identity, cultural background or religious belief. As of November 27, 2020, women represent 33.5% of our global employees, and
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underrepresented minorities (“URMs”, defined as those who identify as Black/African American, Hispanic/Latinx, Native American, Pacific Islander and/or two or more races) represent 10.7% of our U.S. employees. We have a four-pronged strategy to grow our diversity over time by (1) galvanizing youth to pursue technology careers, (2) attracting diverse talent and ensuring fair hiring, (3) creating an inclusive workplace for employees, and (4) joining forces with our customers, partners and peers to drive industry progress.
In order to create products that solve challenging problems for people all over the world, Adobe needs employees who can bring diverse perspectives and life experiences. Therefore, we are committed to bringing more women and underrepresented and underserved groups into tech careers. We partner with many visionary organizations including Braven and Reboot Representation Tech Coalition.
We employ inclusive recruitment practices to source diverse candidates and mitigate potential bias. In fiscal 2020, we formed a new Diversity Talent Acquisition team to accelerate our goals of engaging with diverse talent. We commit to building a diverse interview panel for each open role and we source candidates from a variety of conferences and partnerships, such as AfroTech, BreakLine, Techqueria, Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing and Lesbians Who Tech Summit. We recruit at a broad range of colleges and universities, including historically black colleges and universities, Hispanic-serving institutions and women’s colleges, and we reach out to organizations that support diverse students.
In fiscal 2020, we introduced a global, mandatory ‘Building Inclusion on Your Team’ learning series designed to guide employees on the actions they can take to strengthen empathy and inclusion. We also formed the Taking Action Initiative to accelerate the representation, development and success of our Black employees while creating change in the broader landscape of social injustice and economic inequality. We continue to support our seven employee resource groups that build community for employees from underrepresented groups. To help build inclusion at the individual and team level, we continue to advance our Adobe For All In Action initiative which promotes five simple actions that employees can take to foster a supportive work environment.
We also help drive diversity across our industry by actively supporting our customers, suppliers, partners and peers as they work to improve diversity and inclusion in their own workplaces, policies and practices. In fiscal 2020, we collaborated with industry peers to advance diversity across multiple dimensions including pledging our commitment to improve experiences of people with disabilities as a member of The Valuable 500, address the impacts of COVID-19 through the 5-Point Action Agenda consortium, and interview at least one qualified person of color for every open VP-and-above role through the ParityPledge.
We have invested in analysis and transparency to demonstrate our commitment to fair compensation and opportunity. We define pay parity as ensuring that employees in the same job and location are paid fairly regardless of their gender or ethnicity. We first announced that we achieved global gender pay parity in October 2018, and in September 2020 we reaffirmed gender pay parity. In September 2020, we also announced we achieved pay parity between URM employees and non-URM employees. In February 2019, we coined the term “opportunity parity” to refer to fairness in promotion and horizontal movement across demographic groups and in fiscal 2020 we shared promotion and horizontal movement metrics, by gender and U.S. race/ethnicity.
Additional information on our diversity and inclusion strategy, diversity metrics and programs can be found on our website at adobe.com/diversity. Nothing on our website shall be deemed incorporated by reference into this Annual Report on Form 10-K.
Compensation, Benefits and Well-being
We offer fair, competitive compensation and benefits that support our employees’ overall well-being. To ensure alignment with our short- and long-term objectives, our compensation programs for all employees include base pay, short-term incentives, and opportunities for long-term incentives. Our well-being and benefit programs focus on four key pillars: physical, emotional, financial and community. We offer a wide array of benefits including comprehensive health and welfare insurance, generous time-off and leave, and retirement and financial support. We provide emotional well-being services through our Employee Assistance Program and a variety of interactive apps. Our wellness reimbursement of up to $600 per year for each eligible employee, lifestyle coaching, global well-being speaker series and ergonomic programs help to support employees’ physical well-being. In addition, our financial education and financial wellness coaches offer employees tools and resources to reach their personal financial goals.
In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, we implemented significant changes that we determined were in the best interest of our employees as well as the communities in which we operate. This includes having the vast majority of our employees work from home, while implementing additional safety measures for employees continuing critical on-site work. We also provide flexible work hours and up to 20 working days per calendar year of paid time off for employees who cannot work
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due to circumstances related to COVID-19. We have also provided a work-from-home fund to assist employees in that transition and added several company-wide paid days off and caregiving support to help employees balance their work and life responsibilities.
Growth and Development
Career development is a primary reason new hires decide to join Adobe and existing employees decide to stay at Adobe. Therefore, we actively foster a learning culture where employees are empowered to drive their career progression, supporting professional development and providing on-demand learning platforms. Our Learning Fund offers each eligible employee up to $11,000 per year for long-term undergraduate and graduate studies, as well as short-term professional development. Our development programs play a critical role in engaging and retaining our employees as these programs offer opportunities to continually enhance their skills for a variety of career opportunities across the company.
AVAILABLE INFORMATION
Our Annual Report on Form 10-K, Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q, Current Reports on Form 8-K and amendments to reports filed or furnished pursuant to Sections 13(a) and 15(d) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended, are available free of charge on our Investor Relations website at www.adobe.com/adbe as soon as reasonably practicable after we electronically file such material with, or furnish it to, the SEC. The information posted to our website is not incorporated into this Annual Report on Form 10-K.
INFORMATION ABOUT OUR EXECUTIVE OFFICERS
Adobe’s executive officers as of January 15, 2021 are as follows:
Name Age Positions
Shantanu Narayen 57 Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer
Mr. Narayen currently serves as our Chairman of the Board, President and Chief Executive Officer. He joined Adobe in January 1998 as Vice President and General Manager of our engineering technology group. In January 1999, he was promoted to Senior Vice President, Worldwide Products, and in March 2001 he was promoted to Executive Vice President, Worldwide Product Marketing and Development. In January 2005, Mr. Narayen was promoted to President and Chief Operating Officer, and effective December 2007, he was appointed our Chief Executive Officer and joined our Board of Directors. In January 2017, he was named our Chairman of the Board. Mr. Narayen serves as lead independent director on the board of directors of Pfizer, a multinational pharmaceutical corporation. Mr. Narayen holds a B.S. in Electronics Engineering from Osmania University in India, a M.S. in Computer Science from Bowling Green State University and an M.B.A. from the Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley.
John Murphy 52 Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer
Mr. Murphy currently serves as our Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. He joined Adobe in March 2017 and served as our Senior Vice President, Chief Accounting Officer and Corporate Controller until April 2018. Prior to joining Adobe, Mr. Murphy served as Senior Vice President, Chief Accounting Officer and Corporate Controller of Qualcomm Incorporated from September 2014 to March 2017. He previously served as Senior Vice President, Controller and Chief Accounting Officer of DIRECTV Inc. from November 2007 until August 2014, and Vice President and General Auditor of DIRECTV from October 2004 to November 2007. Prior to joining DIRECTV he worked at several global companies, including Experian, Nestle, and Atlantic Richfield (ARCO), in a variety of finance and accounting roles. He served as Director of DirecTV Holdings LLC from November 2007 until August 2014. Mr. Murphy serves on the Corporate Advisory Board of the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California. He holds an MBA from the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California, a B.S. in Accounting from Fordham University.
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Name Age Positions
Scott Belsky 40 Chief Product Officer and Executive Vice President, Creative Cloud
Mr. Belsky joined Adobe in December 2017 as Chief Product Officer and Executive Vice President, Creative Cloud. Prior to joining Adobe in December 2017, Belsky was a venture investor at Benchmark in San Francisco from February 2016 to December 2017. Prior to Benchmark, Belsky led Adobe's mobile strategy for Creative Cloud from December 2012 to January 2016, having joined the company through the acquisition of Behance. Belsky co-founded Behance in 2006 and served as its CEO for over 6 years. He was an early advisor and investor to Pinterest, Uber and Warby Parker and other early-stage companies, and co-founded and serves on the board of Globality, a referrals platform that empowers the careers of independent professionals. Mr. Belsky also serves on the advisory board of Cornell University's Entrepreneurship Program and as President of the Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum board of trustees.
Anil Chakravarthy 53 Executive Vice President and General Manager, Digital Experience Business and Worldwide Field Operations
Mr. Chakravarthy joined Adobe in January 2020 as Executive Vice President and General Manager, Digital Experience and was given responsibility over Worldwide Field Operations in July 2020, when he was appointed Executive Vice President and General Manager, Digital Experience Business and Worldwide Field Operations. Prior to joining Adobe, he served as Informatica’s Chief Executive Officer from August 2015 to January 2020 and Executive Vice President and Chief Product Officer from September 2013 to August 2015. Prior to joining Informatica, for over nine years, Mr. Chakravarthy held multiple leadership roles at Symantec Corporation, most recently serving as its Executive Vice President, Information Security from February 2013 to September 2013. Prior to Symantec, he was a Director of Product Management for enterprise security services at VeriSign. Mr. Chakravarthy began his career as an engagement manager at McKinsey & Company. He also serves on the board of the Silicon Valley Leadership Group. Mr. Chakravarthy holds a Bachelor of Technology in Computer Science and Engineering from the Institute of Technology, Varanasi, India and Master of Science and Ph.D. degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Gloria Chen 56 Chief People Officer and Executive Vice President, Employee Experience
Ms. Chen joined Adobe in 1997 and currently serves as Chief People Officer and Executive Vice President, Employee Experience. In her more than 20 years at Adobe, she has held senior leadership positions in worldwide sales operations, customer service and support, and strategic planning. In October 2009, Ms. Chen was appointed Vice President and Chief of Staff to the Chief Executive Officer. In March 2018, she was promoted to Senior Vice President, Strategy and Growth, in November 2019, she was elevated to Executive Vice President, Strategy and Growth and in January 2020, she was promoted to Chief People Officer and Executive Vice President, Employee Experience. Prior to joining Adobe, Ms. Chen was an engagement manager at McKinsey & Company. Ms. Chen holds a BS in electrical engineering from the University of Washington, an MS in electrical and computer engineering from Carnegie Mellon University and an MBA from Harvard Business School.
Bryan Lamkin 60 Executive Vice President and General Manager, Digital Media
Mr. Lamkin currently serves as Executive Vice President and General Manager, Digital Media. He rejoined Adobe in February 2013 as Senior Vice President, Technology and Corporate Development. From June 2011 to May 2012, Mr. Lamkin served as President and Chief Executive Officer of Clover, a mobile payments platform. Prior to Clover, Mr. Lamkin co-founded and served as the Chief Executive Officer of Bagcheck, a sharing and discovery platform, from June 2010 to May 2011. From April 2009 to June 2010, Mr. Lamkin served as Senior Vice President of Consumer Products and Applications at Yahoo!, a global technology company providing online search, content and communication tools. From May 2008 to April 2009, Mr. Lamkin served as Executive in Residence at Sutter Hill Ventures. Mr. Lamkin previously was with Adobe from 1992 to 2006 and held various senior management positions including Senior Vice President, Creative Solutions Business Unit.
Mr. Lamkin announced his intent to retire as Executive Vice President and General Manager, Digital Media on October 20, 2020. His retirement will be effective in the first quarter of fiscal year 2021.
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Name Age Positions
Ann Lewnes
59 Chief Marketing Officer and Executive Vice President, Corporate Strategy and Development
Ms. Lewnes joined Adobe in November 2006 and currently serves as Chief Marketing Officer and Executive Vice President, Corporate Strategy and Development. Ann has held the position of Chief Marketing Officer for over a decade and since December 2020, she also leads Adobe’s corporate strategy and strategic M&A efforts globally as Executive Vice President, Corporate Strategy and Development. Prior to joining Adobe, Ms. Lewnes spent 20 years at Intel Corporation, where she was Vice President of Sales and Marketing. Ms. Lewnes is a board member of Mattel and the Adobe Foundation.
Abhay Parasnis 46 Executive Vice President, Chief Technology Officer and Chief Product Officer, Document Cloud
Mr. Parasnis currently serves as Executive Vice President, Chief Technology Officer and Chief Product Officer, Document Cloud. He joined Adobe in July 2015 as Senior Vice President of Adobe's Cloud Technology & Services organization and Chief Technology Officer and in February 2020, he was appointed Chief Technology Officer and Executive Vice President, Strategy and Growth. Prior to joining Adobe, he served as President and Chief Operating Officer at Kony, Inc. from March 2013 to March 2015. From January 2012 to November 2013, Mr. Parasnis was a Senior Vice President and later Strategic Advisor for the Oracle Public Cloud at Oracle. Prior to joining Oracle, he was General Manager of Microsoft Azure AppFabric at Microsoft from April 2009 to December 2011.
Dana Rao 51 Executive Vice President, General Counsel and Corporate Secretary
Mr. Rao currently serves as our Executive Vice President, General Counsel and Corporate Secretary. He joined Adobe in April 2012 and served as our Vice President, Intellectual Property and Litigation where he spearheaded strategic initiatives including the company’s litigation efforts, and its patent, trademark and copyright portfolio strategies until June 2018. Prior to joining Adobe, Mr. Rao was with Microsoft Corporation for 11 years, serving in a variety of roles including Associate General Counsel of Intellectual Property and Licensing, where he oversaw all patent matters for Microsoft’s entertainment and devices division as well as the company-wide patent acquisition team. From 1997 until March 2001, he served as a patent attorney at Fenwick & West. He holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Villanova University and a J.D. from George Washington University.
Mark Garfield 50 Vice President, Chief Accounting Officer and Corporate Controller
Mr. Garfield currently serves as our Vice President, Chief Accounting Officer and Corporate Controller. Prior to joining Adobe in December 2018, Mr. Garfield served as the Vice President of Finance of Cloudflare, Inc. commencing in November 2017. He served as Senior Vice President and Chief Accounting Officer at Symantec Corporation from March 2014 to October 2017. Prior to joining Symantec, he was at Brightstar Corporation where he served primarily as Senior Vice President and Chief Accounting Officer from January 2013 to February 2014. Mr. Garfield served as Director of Finance at Advanced Micro Devices from August 2010 to December 2012. Prior to Advanced Micro Devices, Mr. Garfield also served in senior level finance roles at LoudCloud and Ernst and Young. Mr. Garfield holds a B.A. in Business Economics from University of California at Santa Barbara.
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