The recent announcement of Workfront’s acquisition by Adobe – expected to occur between December 2020 and February 2021 – marks an exciting opportunity for marketers. Currently, Adobe provides world-class creative development, site services and marketing execution solutions with the Adobe Experience Platform. Combine this with Workfront’s highly optimized and coordinated workflow, and marketers now have unparalleled levels of creativity, engagement, efficiency and effectiveness.
At CapabilitySource, we believe this acquisition addresses a common marketing operations need to elevate marketing effectiveness while also driving efficiency at scale. This is a big win for current Workfront customers, current Adobe Experience Platform customers and the broader marketing community in search of a fully integrated and optimized MarTech suite; especially those that align with the B2C use case.
At CapabilitySource, we anticipate that Workfront will be integrated as part of the Adobe Marketing Cloud. Nevertheless, Workfront will likely continue to provide exceptional value to non-marketing teams such as IT & PMO that require world class enterprise work management capability.
Workfront users in marketing will likely see new capabilities which cater to the needs of enterprise marketing teams. Clear advantage should emerge as strategy, creative, execution and fulfillment work throughout the entire marketing cycle is orchestrated by Workfront and enabled by Adobe.
Considering Adobe’s large enterprise customer base, global presence and advanced marketing capabilities, we expect that Workfront will be leveraged in broader global marketing scenarios. Additionally, there should be new value beyond traditional creative team use cases and opportunities to address workflow needs in Strategy, Finance, Sales, IT, Compliance and in achieving Agency Cost Optimization.
Adobe has a strong presence among companies of diverse industries that span B2B, B2C and B2E use cases. With the addition of Workfront, we believe that Adobe has the full complement of digital technologies needed to meet the needs of B2C clients that seek world-class Digital Experience Platform (DXP) capabilities.
As Workfront use expands to the broader Adobe community, we anticipate that the community will become more diverse and active. This will result in additional insights, sources of knowledge and creative applications of the Workfront technology. Due to the diverse nature of this community, we also expect that more value will be realized through intellectual and professional discussion.
Overall at CapabilitySource, we believe this acquisition will result in new opportunities for marketing teams to improve by leveraging both Workfront and Adobe together. We have seen evidence of this in our existing enterprise client base. In preparation, we recommend that current Workfront product owners as well as marketing operation leaders and administrators gain a general understanding of the Adobe Experience Platform. Furthermore, current Adobe MarTech leaders, technology owners and administrators should gain an understanding of Workfront and evaluate ways it may improve marketing efficiency and effectiveness. If your marketing roadmap includes Marketing Operations performance goals, Workfront may impact them quickly. CapabilitySource can help you understand these technologies and ways they may be used together.
As an existing partner of both Adobe and Workfront, CapabilitySource will be carefully evaluating what this acquisition means to our current and prospective clients. We will continue to share our perspectives as we gain insight from Adobe, Workfront, current customers, industry analysts and from our own marketing experts. If you are interested in a high-level practitioner’s overview of Workfront or the Adobe Experience Platform, please contact Will Foreman with CapabilitySource at will.foreman@capabilitysource.com.
