Of course, the primary integration lift will start with Adobe investing in expanding native features starting with the Adobe Experience cloud, but to reach and serve those beyond marketing practitioners, Adobe can more tightly integrate Adobe Sign and even the Adobe Creative Cloud into the Workfront platform. At first glance, that’s a tidy overlap, but our view is that Adobe has the opportunity to use the non-Adobe Workfront user base, who are generally operational in nature, in order to extend all three of Adobe’s clouds. While creatives and marketers are generally the practitioners in Adobe, about one in three of Workfront’s 3,000 customers are current customers of Adobe. When forecasting the impact of this acquisition, Adobe can now open new conversation onramps with operational teams of every discipline within an enterprise. What in 2009 started out as a digital marketing platform with the acquisition of Omniture for $1.8 billion, the Adobe Experience Cloud now extends beyond digital marketing. By that time, Adobe should have re-defined the category. Adobe just bought the most comprehensive platform, so the followers are going to need to both buy point solutions and stich and build to reach parity to the Adobe + Workfront offering. This acquisition unlocks value beyond marketing. Adobe just laid down the gauntlet for all others to follow. With remote work, and the ubiquitous adoption of collaboration tools, we’ve entering a new era of how work gets done. It now embeds the Operational System of Record (OSR) within the digital experience ecosystem. The category is now established, and this acquisition promotes the category to a new level. In the past few months, we’ve seen the IPO of Atlassian, owners of Jira and Wrike, and Asana. While the $1.5 billion acquisition of Workfront is more than a single tip of the hat for the PPM category, it marked a thunderclap for the enterprise marketing cloud technology providers. We believe it will change both the marketing cloud category, and the Portfolio and Program Management (PPM) software category.

As Lima Consulting Group is both a Gold Partner with Adobe and a certified and experienced Workfront partner, our close relationships with both companies give us some insight as to what this acquisition means beneath the surface. Let’s immediately get beyond the vital stats and talk about what this acquisition means for both those in the industry and for Wall Street.

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