This week in Las Vegas 16,000 attendees gathered to watch Adobe executives interview CIOs, CMOs, and some celebrities too. It was part all part of Adobe Summit, the vendor’s conference for customers and partners using the products available in Adobe Experience Cloud.
If you didn’t get a chance to attend yourself, here are three key announcements you missed and some guidance on where you can dive deeper.
Linking up with LinkedIn
Signing into account-based websites with LinkedIn is old hat in the industry now. But that doesn’t mean it’s easy to integrate your own digital experience with LinkedIn’s APIs, allowing professional accounts on the social business network to inform a personalized experience. Adobe says it is building on a partnership with Microsoft to help its customers do just that.
Adobe positions the solution as a way to help sales teams navigate the often long, multi-stakeholder, complicated process of B2B purchasing. By using LinkedIn accounts to track interactions (assuming prospects are allowing the sign-in), sales and marketing teams can deliver content appropriate for the phase of the buying process, and identify who’s best to take the next step with the buyer.
Playing a role in the integration will be Marketo Engage’s Account Profiling capability, showing that Adobe is finding ways to integrate the features of its big acquisition into its platform.
‘Sneaks’ offers a preview of future features
Every year at Adobe Summit for the past eight years, the vendor hosts its popular Sneaks session in which attendees are invited to drink beer while watching Adobe developers showcase leading-edge features for existing portfolio products while a celebrity comedian desperately tries to make sense of it all. This year actress Mindy Kaling took a peek at the R&D labs projects.
Features this year included a demonstration of how Adobe Experience Cloud can deliver an augmented reality experience to shoppers through a mobile app. Another concept connected drivers to the maintenance needs of their car that would show data on battery performance and engine health. And a new project, Intelligent Agent, imagines a voice-driven experience for professionals that have to review long and complicated documents and extract pertinent details.
Open Data Initiative
Building upon an alliance first unveiled last September, Adobe, Microsoft, and SAP revealed some new details about the Open Data Initiative. The name might be a tad misleading, as this is not an initiative to make any data from the firms involved open source, but it is at least to have some agreed-upon standards that will allow their software to play nice with each other.
"The greatest asset that everyone in this room has is data. Except it's locked up in silos. Our partnership with @SAP is about unlocking that data." — @satyanadella on our Open Data Initiative. Learn more: https://t.co/CYVUeu6wM0 pic.twitter.com/ohJk4hVnaB
— Adobe (@Adobe) March 27, 2019
In the coming months, the three companies will deliver a new approach for publishing, appending, and reading data feeds from the Adobe Experience Platform. Data from Dynamics 365, Office 365, and SAP C/4HANA will be available to add to users’ data lakes.
As many enterprises are looking to compile all of their raw data into a singular “data lake” to make it available for many applications, such as artificial intelligence training, the boosted interconnectivity is welcome news to customers. Unilever was one customer on-stage discussing plans to use the new approach in their own business operations. The firm thinks it can help reduce its plastic packaging and encourage customers to recycle.