Item 1. Business
ITEM 1. BUSINESS
OVERVIEW
Founded in 1982, Adobe 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, graphic and experience designers and game 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, smartphones, other electronic devices and digital media formats.
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 desktop and laptop computers, smartphones, tablets, other devices and the web, 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 our website 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.
OFFERINGS
For almost 40 years, Adobe’s innovations have transformed how individuals, teams, businesses and governments engage and interact across all types of media. We deliver tools and services to empower individuals to create, collaborate and express their vision, transform businesses with compelling, personalized experiences in streamlined workflows and connect communities with new levels of collaboration.
While we continue to offer a broad portfolio of products, services and solutions, we focus our investments in two areas of strategic growth:
Digital Media. We provide 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, engage with and collaborate on documents and creative content. Our Digital Media segment is centered around Adobe Creative Cloud and Adobe Document Cloud, which include Creative Cloud Express, Photoshop, Illustrator, Lightroom, Premiere Pro, Acrobat,
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Adobe Sign and many more products, offering a variety of tools for creative professionals, communicators and other consumers. This is the core of what we have delivered to users for decades, and we have continually evolved and expanded our business model to provide our customers with a range of flexible solutions that allow them to reach their full creative potential anytime, anywhere, on any device and on projects of all types.
Digital Experience. We provide an integrated platform and set of applications and services through Adobe Experience Cloud that enable brands and businesses 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 and executives across the C-suite. The foundation of our offering is Adobe Experience Platform, which provides businesses and brands with an open and extensible system for customer experience management that transforms customer data into robust customer profiles that update in real time and uses insights driven by artificial intelligence (“AI”) to enable the delivery of personalized digital experiences across various channels in milliseconds.
With the creative power of our Digital Media business and the data-based tools of our Digital Experience business, we are able to offer a comprehensive suite of offerings to our customers. Through these tools and services, 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 of these areas, where our mission to change the world through digital experiences has never been more relevant, as people seek new ways to communicate and businesses continue to invest in digital transformation. 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, and our legacy products and solutions are contained within the third segment, Publishing and Advertising.
MARKET OVERVIEW
This overview provides an explanation of our markets and a discussion of strategic opportunities in fiscal 2022 and beyond for each of our segments. See the section titled “Results of Operations” in Part II, Item 7 titled “Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations” of this report and Note 2 of our Notes to Consolidated Financial Statements for further segment information.
Digital Media
Opportunity
In today’s digital world, design and creativity have never been more relevant, providing a significant market opportunity for Adobe in digital media. Everyone has a story to tell—from creative professionals, to communicators, to consumers, to first-time creators—and they need the tools, services and capabilities at their fingertips to tell those stories on an ever-increasing number of canvasses. In a creator economy that is continually expanding, creators are looking for tools to help them easily make and share unique and beautiful content without complexity. At the same time, creativity is becoming increasingly collaborative, more critical to every company’s success and more complex. We believe Adobe is in a strong position to capitalize on these trends with innovation that will accelerate the creative process to empower individuals to create wherever inspiration strikes and enable more effective collaboration between creators and stakeholders.
The flagship of our Digital Media business is Adobe Creative Cloud, a subscription service that allows members to use our creative products integrated with cloud-delivered services across desktop, web and mobile devices. We believe in creativity for all, and Creative Cloud addresses the needs of all content creators, from creative professionals, such as artists, designers, developers, students and administrators, to knowledge workers, marketers, educators, enthusiasts and communicators and to consumers. Our customers rely on our products for content creation, photo editing, design, video and animation production,
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mobile app and gaming development and more. In this era of connected creativity, we envision Creative Cloud functioning as a creative system, keeping our users connected to everything and everyone they need to make a project successful. We believe we have significant opportunities to grow by expanding content-first, task-based creativity, advancing every creative category across desktop, web and mobile, expanding 3D and immersive content creation, enabling seamless collaboration across all stakeholders and inspiring and empowering the creative community through sharing and monetization.
Adobe’s Digital Media segment also includes our Adobe Document Cloud business, a unified, cloud-based document services platform, which integrates Adobe’s pioneering PDF technology with our Acrobat and Adobe Sign applications to deliver fully digital document workflows. Digital documents have a mission-critical role in powering modern businesses with hundreds of millions of communicators worldwide interacting with documents every day. With this digital transformation, we have the opportunity to continue to accelerate document productivity with Adobe Document Cloud, modernizing how people view, share and engage with documents. 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 there are hundreds of millions of users that engage with PDF files on a daily basis, in industries such as legal, financial services and publishing, as well as a broader array of communicators and Acrobat Reader users, who can also use the expanded capabilities provided by our Acrobat applications and the document services platform found in Document Cloud.
Strategy
Our goal for our Digital Media business is to be the leading platform for creativity and digital document solutions, where we offer a range of products and services that allow individuals, teams, small and medium businesses, enterprises and government institutions, including both professionals and enthusiasts, to design and deliver content seamlessly. With content creation, consumption and monetization happening across all surfaces and media types, we aim to deliver new ways to unleash creativity and accelerate document productivity, and we believe this is an area of significant opportunity for growth through expansion of our customer base. We aim to achieve this by using data-driven customer engagement, driving product-led growth through innovation to make our creative applications more accessible and easier to learn and meeting customer needs holistically to increase the value of our products.
We continue to redefine the creative process with Creative Cloud, so that our customers can connect with everything and everyone they need to create, collaborate and be inspired. We are empowering content-first, task-based creativity with our launch of Creative Cloud Express, a web and mobile application with a content- and template-first experience to enable a broad spectrum of users, including novice content creators, communicators and creative professionals, to create, edit and customize content quickly and easily, in December 2021. We aim to continue to advance every creative category across desktop, web and mobile. We have delivered our flagship applications, including Photoshop, Illustrator and Lightroom, on desktop and mobile devices to allow users the ability to work from anywhere on any device and to collaborate with stakeholders. We are building collaboration deeply into our applications and workflows to enable seamless collaboration across stakeholders. We are taking Creative Cloud to the web, beginning with a public beta version of Photoshop, which will allow Creative Cloud subscribers to make edits to and collaborate on their files directly in their browser. We are continuing to focus on democratizing 3D and immersive content creation with Adobe Aero and our Substance suite of products, as well as through integrating our Substance 3D capabilities into our other applications. We continue to introduce new features and solutions in our products, such as auto-masking and new and improved neural filters in Photoshop, auto-captioning in Premiere, adjustment layers and perspective grids in Adobe Fresco and additional motion features in Adobe XD. We are pursuing new ways to inspire, empower and connect the creative community, such as through our Create Change series, our creative residency program and supporting live, interactive tutorials with creators on Behance. We also offer a range of other creative tools and services, including hobbyist products, such as Photoshop Elements and Premiere Elements; libraries of creative assets, such as Adobe Stock and Adobe Fonts; mobile-first apps, such as Photoshop Camera; and Creative Cloud Libraries, a central place for users to store their assets. Further descriptions of our Digital Media products are included below under “Principal Products and Services.”
On October 7, 2021, Adobe acquired Frame.io and began integrating its leading cloud-based video collaboration platform into Adobe Creative Cloud. With the acquisition of Frame.io, we aim to make the creative process even more collaborative, productive and efficient by enhancing Adobe Creative Cloud with Frame.io’s cloud-native collaboration workflows, while continuing to enable third-party applications. As a first step in this direction, we are more deeply integrating and enhancing Frame.io’s review and approval capabilities in Premiere Pro and After Effects to deliver a native collaborative platform for video editing.
In our Creative Cloud business, we continue to employ a pricing strategy, as appropriate, to move our customers to better-value offerings as well as attract past customers and potential users to try out our products and ultimately subscribe. As part of our strategy, we use a data-driven operating model and our Digital Experience solutions offered through Adobe
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Experience Cloud 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. Our customers have the flexibility to subscribe to over twenty of our Creative Cloud products through a single subscription or, for many of our applications, through various collections of our individual subscriptions to point products. To better serve our current users and potential users, we offer free and premium levels for certain applications, such as Creative Cloud Express, and targeted packages and suites, such as our Photography Plan and Substance 3D Collection. We use our data-driven operating model to optimize conversion of our users of free apps and trials to paid subscribers. Our collaboration tools and services help us to further expand our universe of business customers beyond creative professionals to other stakeholders who use our products for review and approval 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 existing users, attract new customers and grow a recurring and predictable revenue stream that is recognized ratably.
In our Adobe Document Cloud business, we expect to drive sustained long-term revenue growth through a continued expansion of our customer base by continuing to deliver the best PDF experience on and across every platform, improve Acrobat web’s functionality and single-click ease of use, expand the number of task-based actions in Acrobat, integrate Adobe Sign into Acrobat across all surfaces, drive innovation with Adobe Sensei (machine-learning/AI) to make both new and legacy documents more intelligent and responsive, unlock business workflows through PDF and Adobe Sign APIs, and leverage diversified go-to-market motions to reach all segments. With over 50 million searches for PDF-related actions per month, we intend to harness that demand and attract new users to our Document Cloud services through Acrobat web, which allows anyone to quickly access tools to create, edit, convert, sign and compress PDFs through their web browser. 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 reach 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.
As our Document Cloud customers increasingly expect business processes to be seamless across devices and the web, we are expanding our Document Cloud capabilities to meet this need. Acrobat Reader is available on mobile devices, with many of its standard features available on the go, and features “Liquid Mode” to automatically reformat PDFs for quick navigation and easier consumption on smaller screens. Acrobat is also available on the web, delivering quick results for common PDF actions with a single click. Adobe Scan powers mobile devices with scanning capabilities, transforming paper documents into full-featured PDFs. Adobe Sign also provides a green alternative to costly, paper-based solutions and offers a modern, convenient solution for customers to digitally manage their documents, automate 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 continue to migrate away from paper-based processes and adopt our solutions to modernize and digitize document experiences, growing our revenue with this business in the process.
Digital Experience
Opportunity
Digital transformation is a macro trend that affects every business, government and educational institution today—every business is a digital business. Consumers today buy experiences, not just products, and they demand personalized digital experiences that are relevant, engaging, seamless and secure across an ever-expanding range of channels and devices. Business customers increasingly have the same expectations, which drives business-to-business (“B2B”) companies to deliver business-to-consumer (“B2C”) experiences with a “business-to-everyone” (“B2E”) strategy. Delivering the best, personalized experience to a consumer at a given moment requires the right combination of data, insights and content across multiple channels in real time and at scale. In turn, executives, including those at the world’s leading brands, are increasingly seeking solutions that enable real-time personalization at scale. Marketing and IT teams are looking for a return on investment to demonstrate the business impact of their transformation initiatives.
Adobe Experience Cloud is powering digital businesses by providing exceptional experiences to their customers via a comprehensive suite of solutions. We continue to believe that addressing the challenges of customer experience management is
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a large and growing opportunity and we are in position to help businesses and enterprises invest in solutions that aid their goals to transform how they engage with their customers and constituents digitally.
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 personalized experiences at scale and deliver intelligence for businesses of any size in any industry. The Adobe Experience Platform further strengthens our differentiation and competitive advantage offering a way to connect our comprehensive set of solutions.
Adobe Experience Cloud delivers solutions for our customers across the following strategic growth pillars:
• Data insights and audiences . Our solutions, including Adobe Analytics, Adobe Experience Platform, Customer Journey Analytics, Adobe Audience Manager and our Real-time Customer Data Platform, deliver robust customer profiles and AI-powered analytics across the customer journey to assist our customers in providing timely, relevant experiences across platforms.
• Content and commerce . Our solutions help customers manage, deliver and optimize content delivery, through Adobe Experience Manager and to enable shopping experiences that scale from mid-market to enterprise businesses, with Adobe Commerce.
• Customer journeys . Our solutions help businesses manage, test, target, personalize and orchestrate campaigns and customer journeys across B2E use cases, including through Marketo Engage, Adobe Campaign, Adobe Target and Journey Optimizer.
• Marketing workflow . We offer Adobe Workfront, a work management platform directed toward marketers to orchestrate campaign workflows.
We also 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 the Adobe Experience Platform, AI services 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 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, growth within existing customer accounts and product differentiation. We are continuing to add new services, such as Adobe Developer App Builder and Adobe Experience Cloud for Healthcare, and add new functionality and features to our current offerings, such as a new B2B edition of Adobe Real-Time Customer Data Platform, Adobe Experience Manager Screens and new personalization features in Adobe Experience Cloud. To give our customers increased flexibility, better functionality and expand our reach, we are also delivering new and improved integrations, such as increased synergy between our Experience Cloud products and Creative Cloud and Adobe Sign. Within our established base of customers, we intend to pursue growth through continued expansion of mid-market and enterprise customer accounts by encouraging such customers to take advantage of our suite of end-to-end products. 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 ones we have formed with Microsoft, IBM, Fluent Commerce and Dentsu, 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 2022 and beyond.
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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 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 this industry.
Adobe Advertising Cloud delivers an end-to-end, demand-side 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 we generally generate revenue in Advertising through usage-based offerings.
COMPETITION
Overview
Adobe participates in a highly competitive environment globally, where our competitors vary by industry segment and range from large multinational enterprises to smaller entities with a more narrowly focused product offering. Across our business, we recognize hundreds of competitors worldwide. The markets for our products and services are characterized by new industry standards, evolving distribution models, technology innovation, 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.
A summary of the competitive environment for each of our business segments is included below:
Digital Media
Our Digital Media segment faces competition from large, established companies as well as a variety of point offerings, free products and downloadable apps. We compete in a constantly evolving market and face significant direct or indirect competition from desktop software companies; device, hardware and camera manufacturers; operating system developers that integrate digital imaging and image management features with their operating systems; smartphone and tablet manufacturers that integrate imaging and video software; proprietary and open source web-authoring tools; mobile-first applications; social media platforms that provide imaging and video offerings, including editing capabilities; stock content marketplaces; and digital document creation, storage, collaboration and signing providers.
We believe competitive factors in our markets include brand leadership, product features and functionalities; integration with related tools and 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; usability and accessibility on multiple devices, including mobile and desktop; and success in educating customers in how to utilize services effectively. 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 or Document Cloud. We are a leader through our ability to offer a very broad and comprehensive array of products and services through our Adobe Creative Cloud. With Creative Cloud, we believe we compete well with our features and functionality, ease of use, product reliability, value and performance characteristics. With Document Cloud, we believe we compete well based on the global use of PDF, our features and functionalities, which are critical tools for millions of business communicators, and our brand leadership.
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Digital Experience
Our Digital Experience business unit competes in markets that are growing rapidly and characterized by intense competition. Our Adobe Experience Cloud solutions face competition from large, established companies, including large enterprise software, internet and database management companies, in addition to point product solutions and focused competitors, and 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.
We believe competitive factors in our markets include the proven performance, security, scalability, flexibility and reliability of services; 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; brand 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 well with both 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.
Publishing and Advertising
Our Publishing and Advertising product offerings faces competition from large-scale publishing systems and XML-based publishing companies, as well as lower-end desktop publishing products. Our web conferencing product faces competition from a number of established products from other large software companies. Competition involves a number of factors, including product features, ease-of-use, the level of customization and integration supported, the number of hardware platforms supported, service and price. We believe we can successfully compete based upon the quality and features of our products, integrations with our Creative Cloud, Document Cloud and Digital Experience products and our strong brand among users.
PRINCIPAL PRODUCTS AND SERVICES
Digital Media Offerings
Creative Cloud
Adobe Creative Cloud is a cloud-based subscription app that enables creative professionals and enthusiasts alike to express themselves with apps and services for photography, design, video, web and more 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 that 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. Many of our applications are also available as a point product subscription.
Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Lightroom
Adobe Photoshop is the world’s most advanced digital imaging and design app, with powerful editing and effects tools to transform photos. It is available on desktop and iPad, and we recently released a web version that is available in public beta to subscribers. Adobe Lightroom is our cloud-based photo service that allows subscribers to edit, organize, store and share photos across desktop, tablet and mobile devices. In addition to individual subscriptions to Photoshop and Lightroom, we offer a Photography Plan, which is a more limited cloud-based offering than Creative Cloud, targeted at photographers and photo enthusiasts and includes Photoshop, Lightroom and Lightroom Classic. For users looking for fast and powerful photo editing on mobile devices, we also offer Photoshop Express, which uses a touch-based interface for sophisticated photo editing and content creation.
Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Fresco
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 for all kinds of media—print, web, interactive, video and mobile—from web and mobile graphics to product packaging to book illustrations and billboards. Adobe Fresco is our illustration app, available as a free or premium version and on iPhone, iPad, Microsoft Surface tablet and Wacom MobileStudio devices, that
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brings together the world’s largest collection of vector and raster brushes and Live Brushes, powered by Adobe Sensei, to deliver a natural painting and drawing experience.
Adobe InDesign
Adobe InDesign is an 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. Tight integration with other Adobe offerings such as Photoshop, Illustrator, Acrobat, Adobe Stock and Adobe InCopy expands InDesign’s capabilities. Customers can also access Adobe’s 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.
Adobe Premiere Pro and Adobe Premiere Rush
Adobe Premiere Pro is a leading nonlinear video editing app 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. Automated tools and workflows for color, graphics, audio and immersive 360/VR make the editing process more efficient. New features in Premiere Pro include Speech-to-Text, automatic caption generation, native support for Apple M1 chips and tools for stylizing text, among others. Adobe Premiere Rush is an all-in-one video editing app, available as a free or premium version, that simplifies video creation and direct sharing to platforms, including YouTube and Instagram, while delivering professional quality video results.
Adobe XD
Adobe XD is our all-in-one experience design (“XD”) app on desktop and mobile used to build user experiences (“UX”) and user interfaces (“UI”) when designing websites, mobile apps and more. Adobe XD brings design and prototyping together with tools, such as Responsive Resize, Repeat Grid and Auto Animate, that deliver precision and performance, save time, enable seamless collaboration and make sharing easy at each step of the process, allowing individuals and teams to create everything from low-fidelity wireframes to fully interactive prototypes. Adobe XD is available as a free or premium version.
Adobe Stock
Adobe Stock provides designers and businesses with access to millions of high-quality, curated, royalty-free photos, vectors, illustrations, videos, templates, audio and 3D assets, for all of their creative projects. Adobe Stock is built into our Creative Cloud apps, including Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign, enabling users to search, browse and add assets to their Creative Cloud Libraries and instantly access them across all connected devices. Adobe Stock assets include free and paid collections and may be licensed directly within Adobe’s desktop apps, through stock.adobe.com or as a multi-asset subscription.
Substance 3D
Substance 3D is an ecosystem of desktop apps, including Substance 3D Stager, Substance 3D Painter, Substance 3D Sampler and Substance 3D Designer. Customers can build and assemble 3D scenes with Stager, use tools in Painter to texture 3D assets, from advanced brushes to Smart Materials that automatically adapt to your model and use Sampler to digitize and enrich assets. Substance 3D Assets is a 3D materials library from which users can import professional quality 3D textures into their projects and generate infinite texture variations. Substance 3D Modeler, which is currently only available in beta form, interprets spatial input from the physical world, allowing the user to sculpt a model as if in a real workshop, using natural, fluid gestures of the artistic flow, and switch between VR and desktop, at every project stage.
Creative Cloud Express
Creative Cloud Express is our web and mobile app directed towards first-time creators, communicators and creative professionals that enables easy-to-use, efficient content creation, featuring guided tools, one-click solutions for quick projects, simple drag and drop functions, collaboration tools, thousands of templates and access to more than 20,000 fonts and the entire Adobe Stock photo collection. Creative Cloud Express is available as a free or premium version.
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, add effects and create animations. New features include real-time 3D draft preview, a 3D ground plane and improvements to collaboration tools. After Effects works together seamlessly with other Adobe apps such as Premiere Pro, Photoshop, Illustrator, Adobe XD and Adobe Audition, as well as third party software and hardware partners.
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Frame.io
Frame.io is our cloud-native video collaboration platform that streamlines the video production process by enabling editors and key project stakeholders to collaborate with real-time upload, review and approval, frame-accurate commenting, annotations and more.
Behance
Behance is a 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 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 the cloud for easy access and sharing, across desktop and mobile devices. Document Cloud includes Adobe Acrobat DC, Adobe Sign, Adobe Scan and other apps and API services that work standalone or integrate with users’ existing productivity apps, processes and systems.
Adobe Acrobat DC
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 and enables automated, collaborative workflows with a rich set of commenting, editing and sharing tools and direct integration with Adobe Sign. In fiscal year 2021, we also released Acrobat Chrome and Edge extensions allowing users to access our Acrobat tools without leaving the web browser. Acrobat is also included in our Creative Cloud all apps subscription offering.
Acrobat Web
We have brought many of the tools and features of Adobe Acrobat DC to the web with Acrobat web, which offers single-click tools for users to edit, comment, convert, organize and sign PDF documents directly within the web browser. Acrobat web enables quick, easy-to-access results, while introducing users to the power of our offerings. Acrobat web includes both free and premium features.
Adobe Acrobat Reader
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 features to create, edit, export, combine, share and collaborate on PDF documents on mobile devices, including the “Liquid Mode” feature that automatically reformats PDFs 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
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.
Adobe Sign
Our cloud-based e-signature service, Adobe Sign, allows users to securely electronically send and sign any document from any device. Through web and mobile applications, Adobe Sign 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 seamless experiences to customers across web and mobile sites.
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Digital Experience Offerings
Adobe Experience Cloud is a comprehensive collection of best-in-class products and solutions to manage the customer experience, all integrated onto a cloud platform, along with service, support and an open ecosystem. Experience Cloud is comprised of the following sets of solutions for our customers: Adobe Experience Platform; Data, Insights and Audiences; Content and Commerce; Customer Journeys; Marketing Workflow; and Digital Enrollment and Onboarding, which are each described below.
Data, Insights and Audiences
Our Data, Insights and Audiences solutions enable users to stitch together data from across the customer journey into a single view to provide insights based on every interaction in real time, share this data and analysis across the team and organization and AI and machine-learning personalization. The following is a brief description of our solutions for Customer Data and Insights.
Adobe Analytics
Adobe Analytics helps our customers create a holistic view of their business by turning consumer interactions into actionable insights. Driven by AI and machine learning, Adobe Analytics collects, organizes and structures vast streams of data from virtually any channel to deliver real-time insights that are easy for users to process, analyze and share to quickly identify problems and opportunities and to drive conversion and relevant consumer experiences. Our customers can use these analytics to continuously improve marketing activities and better direct their marketing spend. Our Analysis Workspace features a drag-and-drop interface that allows customers to craft an analysis, add visualizations so they can bring data to life, curate a dataset and share and schedule projects across their organization, among other features.
Adobe Experience Platform
Adobe Experience Platform is a purpose-built platform for customer experience management that helps users collect, connect and activate known and unknown customer data from every customer interaction across sources, channels and customer interactions in real time to create robust, unified customer profiles. Adobe Experience Platform standardizes data for intelligence and profile creation and provides an open and extensible cloud infrastructure, real-time updates, AI-driven insights and scalability, with a wide variety of supporting products and services. 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 in real time.
Customer Journey Analytics
Our Customer Journey Analytics service, built on Adobe Experience Platform, brings a powerful set of analytics tools that allow brands to interactively explore and visualize the customer journey across multiple channels and utilize AI-powered insights, while making such analytics more accessible across their organization, to ensure that customer journeys flow seamlessly regardless of channel.
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 virtually any channel and device, unifies that data into audience profiles and activates audience segments by pushing them out to demand-side platforms, campaign management systems and other marketing platforms.
Real-Time Customer Data Platform
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 internal and external, known and unknown customer data to activate real-time customer and account profiles that allow for B2C and B2B marketers to deliver timely, relevant experiences across channels. 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.
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Content and Commerce
Our Content and Commerce solutions help customers manage, deliver, personalize and optimize content across web, mobile and application interfaces, as well as enable shopping experiences that scale from mid-market to enterprise businesses, across devices and channels. The following is a brief description of our solutions for Content and Commerce.
Adobe Experience Manager
Adobe Experience Manager combines digital asset management with a content management system and an end-to-end digital document solution. Adobe Experience Manager Sites provides a content management system built on a scalable, cloud-native foundation to create and deploy personalized experiences across every channel. Adobe Experience Manager Assets offers cloud-native digital asset management to create, manage, deliver and optimize personalized experiences at scale. Adobe Experience Manager Forms provides a cloud-native and scalable solution for personalized end-to-end digital customer onboarding and enrollment, enabling users to create, manage, publish and approve forms and documents.
We also recently released Adobe Experience Manager Screens, which allows customers to connect online and in-venue experiences through digital signage, and Adobe Developer App Builder, which provides a set of tools and services to developers to extend Experience Manager to customers’ existing infrastructure and apply unique parameters to make the UI look and feel unique for their organizations.
Adobe Commerce
Adobe Commerce offers a highly customizable, end-to-end platform to manage, personalize and optimize the commerce experience for physical and digital goods across every touchpoint by bringing together digital commerce, order management and predictive intelligence to enable engaging shopping experiences across B2C, B2B and direct-to-consumer. Based on an open-source ecosystem with thousands of third-party extensions, Adobe Commerce extends beyond the web shopping cart to shoppable experiences, with actionable data analysis and automated back-end workflows, native integrations with other Adobe products, such as Analytics, Target, Experience Manager and Creative Cloud and the capability to be scalable and extensible.
Customer Journeys
Our Customer Journeys 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 Journeys.
Marketo Engage
Marketo Engage is a customer experience management solution optimized for B2B, cross-channel campaigns by bringing together planning, engagement and measurement capabilities into an integrated marketing platform. Capabilities include lead nurturing and management, predictive account profiling for creating account-based experiences, integrated sales application and integrations with third-party marketing apps and Adobe Experience Cloud. Marketo Engage simplifies how companies plan, orchestrate and measure engagement at each stage of the customer experience, and allows companies to better align marketing and sales to engage high priority accounts.
Adobe Campaign
Adobe Campaign is optimized for managing B2C cross-channel marketing campaigns. Adobe Campaign enables marketers to orchestrate the entire customer journey and use rich customer data to create, coordinate and deliver dynamic, personalized experiences that are synchronized across channels, including email, mobile and offline, and determined by each consumer’s behaviors and preferences. Adobe Campaign’s features also include AI-powered email management, multidimensional targeting, in-app messaging and dynamic, customizable reports to analyze success.
Adobe Target
Adobe Target is an AI- and machine-driven personalization engine that lets our customers test, target and optimize content across channels. With Adobe Target, our customers have the tools they need to create omnichannel personalized experiences and create A/B and multivariate tests, done at scale through AI-powered automation so they can quickly discover
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the best customer experience and deliver that experience across all touchpoints. New features include integration with Adobe Real-Time Customer Data Platform, same page segment qualification and enhanced AI-powered capabilities.
Journey Optimizer
Journey Optimizer helps brands drive engagement by providing tools to manage inbound customer engagement with outbound omnichannel campaigns, offering personalized content based on real-time profiles, data-driven insights, cloud-native scalability and API extensibility, within a single application. Users can trigger individual journeys and use real-time insights to personalize that journey, as well as visually map individual journeys across systems in an intuitive, workflow-based interface. Journey Optimizer 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.
Marketing Workflow
Adobe Workfront
Adobe Workfront provides a unified work management application to enable teams to work more efficiently, with tools to strategize, plan, execute, review and deliver on complex workflows. We recently added plugins for Adobe Photoshop and Adobe XD, as well as integrations with Adobe Experience Manager Assets and Adobe Marketo Engage, to enhance our experience delivery to B2B brands and make Workfront features available to more of our users.
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, mobile app stores, SIs, ISVs and VARs, as well as through OEM and hardware bundle customers and our local field offices.
Our local field offices include locations in Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, China, Denmark, France, Germany, Hong Kong, India, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Republic of 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 certain products with maintenance and support, which includes rights to upgrades, when and if available, support, updates and enhancements.
For all periods presented, there were no customers that represented at least 10% of net revenue or that were 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, which include 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 and partners maximize the return on their investments in our cloud solutions and licensed products.
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 for 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 customers’ return on their investment in Adobe solutions.
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Another 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. 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 customers with:
• technical support on the products customers 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 our 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.
We also offer delivery assurance, technical support and enablement services to partners and developer organizations. 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 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.
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.
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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 U.S. and international 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.
We license our desktop software and mobile apps 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. Our enterprise customers license our hosted offerings as SaaS or Managed Services.
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 applications. 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 performance, 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’ wellbeing, and foster their growth and development. As of December 3, 2021, we employed 25,988 people, of which approximately 52% were in the United States and 48% were in our international locations. During fiscal 2021, our total attrition rate was 12%. We have not experienced work stoppages and believe our employee relations are good. Our employee listening program helps us understand employee sentiment on a wide range of topics throughout the employee lifecycle, providing insights that inform our decisions about employee programs, talent risks, management opportunities, employee networks and more. In fiscal year 2021, 76% of our employees participated in our most recent engagement survey.
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 December 3, 2021, women represented 33.8% of our global employees, and underrepresented minorities (“URMs”, defined as those who identify as Black/African American, Hispanic/Latinx, Native American, Pacific Islander and/or two or more races) represented 10.9% of our U.S. employees. To continue to improve employee representation, we have declared a set of aspirational goals for women in leadership positions globally, underrepresented minorities in leadership positions in the United States and overall Black representation.
We have a four-pronged strategy to grow the diversity of our workforce over time, on which we have continued to drive progress during fiscal 2021:
• Pipeline : We help build the pipeline of future technical talent by encouraging young people of all backgrounds to learn and get excited about software coding and careers in tech. In fiscal 2021, we partnered with many visionary organizations including Braven, BRIDGEGOOD, OneSchool and ScholarMatch.
• Candidates : We source candidates from a variety of backgrounds and work to ensure fairness in our interview and hiring processes. In fiscal 2021, we introduced a program called Hiring at Adobe that requires hiring managers to
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complete a training to ensure diverse candidates are part of the interview and screening process; we sourced candidates from a variety of conferences and partnerships, such as AfroTech, BreakLine, Disability:IN and Techqueria; and we initiated the Adobe Anchor School Program, which includes partnerships with historically black colleges and universities and a Hispanic-Serving Institution.
• Employees : We are creating an inclusive workplace through community-building, training and internal awareness. In fiscal 2021, we continued to support our many employee resource groups (“ERGs”) that build community for employees from underrepresented groups, including the recent addition of an Indigenous/First Nations ERG. We hosted our annual global diversity and inclusion event, Adobe For All Week, bringing together thousands of employees to focus on ways to strengthen inclusion and empathy every day.
• Industry : We join forces with our customers, partners, vendors and peers to drive broader progress on diversity. In fiscal 2021, we collaborated with industry peers to advance diversity across multiple dimensions including through our participation in the CEO Action for Diversity & Inclusion, The Valuable 500, the Ascend 5-Point Action Agenda and ParityPledge.
We invest in analysis and transparency to demonstrate our commitment to fair compensation. We define pay parity as ensuring that employees in the same job and location are paid fairly regardless of their gender or ethnicity. In fiscal 2021, we again achieved global gender pay parity and U.S. URM and non-URM pay parity. We are committed to maintaining pay parity, and we plan to continue investing in ongoing salary analysis across hiring, acquisition integrations and annual pay review processes.
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 Wellbeing
We offer fair, competitive compensation and benefits that support our employees’ overall wellbeing. 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. We believe this alignment, whether through equity awards issued by Adobe or employee participation in our employee stock purchase plan, provides employee shareholders with meaningfully deeper connections to Adobe and contributes to the Company's long-term success. Our wellbeing 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 wellbeing 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 wellbeing speaker series and ergonomic programs help to support employees’ physical wellbeing. 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 and 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 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.
Future of Work
Digital transformation and the COVID-19 pandemic has fundamentally changed how people work, and we are leaning into digital-first workflows, tools and resources to enable us to be productive, wherever we are. We also believe in the value of people being together—fostering trust, relationships and collaboration and innovation. We plan to embrace a hybrid model for our workforce to blend the best of what is good for our employees and what is good for our business. Flexibility will be the default for our employees going forward, with our people around the globe having the option to work from home when it makes sense for them, their team and the business. We will remain agile and continually test, learn and iterate, always ensuring our people feel valued, empowered and engaged.
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Growth and Development
Adobe seeks to attract and retain talent by offering a comprehensive range of professional development and resources. Our learning and development teams provide personalized learning paths, facilitated sessions and communities of practice that help employees achieve their career goals. Through Adobe’s Learning Fund, employees are eligible to receive up to $11,000 per year toward university and short-term learning opportunities. Adobe employees also have instant access to training via several industry-leading learning platforms, which provide our global workforce with convenient, timely access to content from subject matter experts.
Adobe is committed to enabling a culture that celebrates talent sharing, career development and agility across the Company. We post all roles internally first before sharing them externally and have made several technology enhancements to make the internal job search easier for employees.
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 21, 2022 are as follows:
Name Age Positions
Shantanu Narayen 58 Chairman and Chief Executive Officer
Mr. Narayen currently serves as our Chairman of the Board 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. He served as President until December 2021. Mr. Narayen serves as lead independent director on the board of directors of Pfizer Inc., 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 MBA from from the University of California, Berkeley.
Daniel Durn 55 Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer
Mr. Durn joined Adobe in October 2021 as Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. Mr. Durn most recently served as a Senior Vice President and CFO of Applied Materials from August 2017 to October 2021. Previously, he was Executive Vice President and CFO at NXP Semiconductors N.V. from December 2015 to August 2017 following its merger with Freescale Semiconductor. Before Freescale, he was CFO and Executive Vice President of Finance and Administration at GlobalFoundries, and he served as Managing Director and Head of Mergers and Acquisitions and Strategy at Mubadala Technology Fund. Prior to that, Dan was a Vice President of Mergers and Acquisitions in the technology practice at Goldman Sachs & Company. Mr. Durn received his MBA in Finance from Columbia Business School and graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy with a B.S. in Control Systems Engineering. He served in the Navy for six years, reaching the rank of lieutenant.
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Name Age Positions
Anil Chakravarthy 54 President, Digital Experience
Mr. Chakravarthy currently serves as President of Adobe’s Digital Experience business. 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 currently serves on the board of Ansys, Inc. and also served on the board of the Silicon Valley Leadership Group until December 2021. Mr. Chakravarthy holds a Bachelor of Technology in Computer Science and Engineering from the Institute of Technology, Varanasi, India and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
David Wadhwani 50 President, Digital Media
Mr. Wadhwani currently serves as President of Adobe’s Digital Media business. Mr. Wadhwani rejoined Adobe in June 2021 to lead Adobe’s global Digital Media business across Adobe Creative Cloud and Adobe Document Cloud as Chief Business Officer and Executive Vice President, Digital Media. Prior to joining Adobe, he was a Venture Partner at Greylock Partners since October 2019. From September 2015 to October 2019, he was President and CEO of AppDynamics. Before that, Mr. Wadhwani previously worked at Adobe as Senior Vice President and General Manager of Adobe’s Digital Media business, having joined Adobe in 2005 through the Company’s acquisition of Macromedia, Inc., where he had been Vice President of Developer Products. Mr. Wadhwani holds a bachelor’s degree in computer science from Brown University and serves on the Brown computer science department advisory board. He is also on the digital advisory board of The Metropolitan Museum of Art and on the Board of Trustees for StoryCorps and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.
Scott Belsky 41 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 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 serves on the board of trustees of the Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum.
Gloria Chen 57 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 M.S. in electrical and computer engineering from Carnegie Mellon University and an MBA from Harvard Business School.
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Name Age Positions
Ann Lewnes
60 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.
Abhay Parasnis 47 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.
As previously announced, Mr. Parasnis will remain in his current role with Adobe until early 2022 and will actively assist with the transition of his duties during that period.
Dana Rao 52 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. 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 JD from George Washington University.
Mark Garfield 51 Senior Vice President, Chief Accounting Officer and Corporate Controller
Mr. Garfield currently serves as our Senior 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 is a board member of the Adobe Foundation. Mr. Garfield holds a B.A. in Business Economics from the University of California, Santa Barbara.
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