ADBE Company Profile

Our strategy is to address the needs of a variety of customers, which include creative professionals'graphic designers, Web designers, videographers, photographers, and professional publishers; enterprise users'knowledge workers, IT managers, line of business managers, and executives; and consumers'digital imaging and digital video hobbyists and enthusiasts. We execute against this strategy by delivering products that support industry standards and can be deployed on multiple computing environments, depending on the product.

The markets for our products are characterized by intense competition, evolving industry standards, rapid software and hardware technology developments, and frequent new product introductions. Our future success will depend on our ability to enhance our existing products, introduce new products on a timely and cost-effective basis, meet changing customer needs, extend our core technology into new applications, and anticipate and respond to emerging standards and other technological changes.

We provide professional services, technical support and customer service across all our customer segments, including enterprises, small/medium businesses, creative professionals, and consumers. Our service and support revenue consists primarily of consulting fees, software maintenance and support fees and training fees.

Services
We have a global professional services team dedicated to designing, developing and implementing solutions for enterprise customers in key vertical markets and to transfer technical expertise to our solution partners. The professional services team uses a comprehensive, customer-focused methodology to develop high-quality solutions, which in turn deliver a competitive advantage to our enterprise customers. This methodology has been developed by capturing best practices from numerous client engagements across a diverse mix of solutions, industries, and customer preferences. Based on this methodology, our teams are able to accelerate the time to value and maximize the return our clients earn on their investment in Adobe solutions.
In addition, Adobe has also created a large and vibrant partner ecosystem that includes a mix of Global System Integrators (“SIs”), Regional SIs, VARs, and solution partners. Adobe invests significant resources in enabling this ecosystem with the right skills and knowledge about our technologies and best practices. Consequently, this ecosystem provides our clients several different choices of partners, and a large accessible pool of skilled resources that can help deploy Adobe solutions. This approach not only creates value for our customers and partners, but also creates a large and productive go-to-market channel for our sales teams.

COMPETITION
The markets for our products and services are characterized by intense competition, new industry standards, evolving business and distribution models, disruptive software and hardware technology developments, frequent new 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 and respond to emerging standards, business models, software delivery methods and other technological changes.

Digital Media
No single company has offerings identical to our Creative Cloud products, but we face collective competition from a variety of point offerings, free products and downloadable apps. Our competitors include offerings from companies such as Apple, Autodesk, Avid, Corel, Microsoft, Quark and others, as well as from many lower-end offerings available on touch-enabled devices via app stores, and from various open source initiatives. We believe our greatest advantage in this market is the scope of our integrated solutions, which work together as part of Creative Cloud. With Creative Cloud we also compete favorably on the basis of features and functionality, ease of use, product reliability, value and performance characteristics.

Professional digital imaging, drawing and illustration products are characterized by feature-rich competition, brand awareness and price sensitivity. Competition in this market is also emerging with drawing and illustration applications on tablet and smartphone platforms. The demand for professional web page layout and professional web content creation tools is constantly evolving and highly volatile. In this area we face direct and indirect competition from desktop software companies and various proprietary and open source web-authoring tools. Our Flash technologies face competition from alternative approaches to building rich content and web applications such as JavaFX, HTML5, native applications and Unity.

The needs of digital imaging and video editing software users are constantly evolving due to rapid technology and hardware advancements in digital cameras, digital video cameras, printers, PCs, tablets, mobile phones and other new devices. Our imaging and video software offerings, including Photoshop, Lightroom, After Effects and Premiere, face competition from established and emerging companies offering similar products. We also continue to face competition from new and free products, including web services and mobile/tablet applications that compete directly with our Adobe Revel offering.
New image editing applications for mobile devices and tablets with features that compete with our professional products are also emerging as adoption of these devices grows. Our consumer digital imaging and video editing offerings are subject to intense competition, including customer price sensitivity, competitor brand awareness and competitor strength in OEM bundling and retail distribution. We face direct and indirect competition in the consumer digital imaging market from a number of companies that market software that competes with ours.

In addition, we face competition from device, hardware and camera manufacturers as they try to differentiate their offerings by bundling, for free, their own digital imaging software, or those of our competitors. Similarly, we face potential competition from operating system manufacturers as they integrate or offer hobbyist-level digital imaging and image management features with their operating systems. We also face competition from smartphone and tablet manufacturers that integrate imaging and video software into their devices to work with cameras that come as part of their smartphone and tablet offerings. In addition, new social networking platforms such as Facebook (including Instagram) and portal sites such as Google and Yahoo! are becoming a direct means to post, edit and share images, bypassing the step of using image editing and sharing software.
Competition is also emerging with imaging and video applications on smartphone and tablet platforms. Competitors are extending their products and feature sets to platforms such as Apple’s iPhone and iPad, and other smartphone and tablet devices. Similarly, new cloud-based offerings continue to emerge which offer image editing and video-editing capabilities, as well as social and sharing features.

As customers such as publishers and media companies increase their desire to deliver their assets to new platforms such as mobile devices and tablets, we expect new and existing companies to continue to offer solutions that address these challenges that are competitive with our Digital Publishing Suite. Many design agencies are building capabilities to offer such solutions, and companies such as Amazon, Apple and Google offer an alternative format and business model for the delivery of newspaper and magazine content to mobile devices.

With our Acrobat business, we continue to face competition from Microsoft. Their widely used Office line of products (as well as open-source alternatives available on the market) enable saving documents as PDF files, competing with Acrobat. Microsoft also offers a proprietary digital rights management technology and a document format, XML Paper Specification (“XPS”), which competes with Adobe PDF. Given the dominance of Microsoft’s Office and Office 365 products, features competitive with Adobe’s Acrobat solutions could harm our overall market opportunity. Our Acrobat product family also faces competition in the PDF file creation market from many clone products. In addition, other PDF creation solutions can be found at a low cost, or for free, on the web. To address these competitive threats, we are working to ensure our Adobe Acrobat applications stay at the forefront of innovation in emerging opportunities such as PDF document generation, document collaboration and document security.

Digital Marketing
The markets in which our Digital Marketing business unit competes are growing rapidly and characterized by intense competition. Our Adobe Marketing Cloud solutions face competition from large companies such as Google, IBM, Oracle, salesforce.com, SAP, SAS, Teradata and others, in addition to point product solutions and focused competitors. Additionally, new competitors are constantly entering these markets. Some of these competitors provide SaaS solutions to customers, generally through a web browser, while others provide software that is installed by customers directly on their servers. In addition, we compete at times with our customers’ or potential customers’ internally developed applications. Of the competitors listed, no single company has products identical to our Adobe Marketing Cloud offerings. Adobe Marketing Cloud competes in a variety of areas, including: reporting and analytics; cross-channel marketing and optimization; online and social marketing; web experience management and others.

Many of the companies with which we compete offer a variety of products or services and as a result could also bundle their products or services, which may result in these companies effectively selling their products or services at or below market prices for individual products. In addition, large software, internet and database management companies have expanded their offerings in the digital marketing area, either by developing competing services or by acquiring existing competitors or strategic partners of ours. We believe competitive factors in our markets include the proven performance, security, scalability, flexibility and reliability of services; the strategic relationships and integration with third-party applications; the intuitiveness and visual appeal of user interfaces; demonstrable cost-effective benefits to customers; pricing; the flexibility of services to match changing business demands; enterprise-level customer service and training; perceived market leadership; the usability of services; real-time data and reporting; independence from portals and search engines; the ability to deploy the services globally; and success in educating customers in how to utilize services effectively. We believe we compete favorably with both the enterprise and low-cost alternatives based on many of these competitive factors including our strong feature set, the breadth of our offerings, our focus on global, multi-brand companies, our superior user experience, tools for building multi-screen, cross-channel applications, standards-based architecture, scalability and performance and leadership in industry standards efforts.

We believe our creative tools heritage differentiates us from our competitors. We have worked closely with marketing and creative customers for over thirty years. We also believe we have leadership in this market, with current customers representing leading global brands. Our comprehensive solutions extend more broadly than any other company in serving the needs of marketers and addressing this market opportunity; we integrate content and data, analytics, personalization, web experience management, cross-channel campaign management and social capabilities in our Adobe Marketing Cloud, surpassing the reach of any competitor. Most importantly, we provide a vision for our digital marketing customers as we engage with them across the important aspects of their business, extending from their use of our Creative Cloud, to how they manage, deliver, measure and monetize their content with our Adobe Marketing Cloud.

Print and Publishing
Our Print and Publishing product offerings face competition from large-scale electronic and web publishing systems, XML-based publishing companies as well as lower-end desktop publishing products. Depending on the product line, competition is based on a number of factors, including: the quality and features of products, ease-of-use, printer service support, the level of customization and integration with other publishing system components, the number of hardware platforms supported, service and price. We believe we can successfully compete based upon the quality and features of our products, our strong brand among users, the widespread adoption of our products among printer service bureaus, and our extensive application programming interface.
In printing technologies, we believe the principal competitive factors for OEMs in selecting a page description language or a printing technology are product capabilities, market leadership, reliability, price, support and engineering development assistance. We believe that our competitive advantages include our technology competency, OEM customer relationships and our intellectual property portfolio.