Though no newcomer to enterprise business solutions, Adobe is a star that has risen at an unprecedented rate. Since acquiring campaign management provider Neolane in June 2013, Adobe has made major changes—from overhauling its marketing suite to launching the Adobe Digital Marketing Cloud.  

Following the acquisition, Adobe worked to integrate Neolane’s technology, gradually unveiling its redesigned suite in a series of announcements culminating at its Digital Marketing Summit in March, where executives touted the revamped cloud platforms, as well as a new integration between the marketing cloud and Adobe’s unparalleled Creative Suite. 

The crown jewel is, for the time being, Adobe Campaign—Neolane’s rebranded cross-channel campaign management solution, which enables marketers to create an integrated customer profile, build meaningful relationships, deliver relevant offers, and orchestrate experiences in real time through an open and flexible architecture.

Adobe has emerged as a key marketing player, thanks to the high level of integration of its marketing cloud solutions and the depth of the campaign management capabilities that those solutions can provide. “As new channels emerge, companies are constantly thinking about the best ways to build multichannel campaigns, and Adobe is aiming to stay one step ahead with Campaign,” Gartner analyst Julie Hopkins says. 

But Adobe’s claim to fame isn’t just its technology. Its vision for growth has turned heads too. In early 2014, Adobe announced a strategic partnership with SAP that would allow it to reap the rewards of SAP’s extensive enterprise reach. “The partnership is ripe with potential,” Paul Greenberg, president of The 56 Group, told CRM in March. “There’s opportunity for Adobe to compete with major vendors, and building on this alliance will take it one step closer,” he said. 

The company is still charging full speed ahead, recently announcing new capabilities for Adobe Analytics, including a real-time data firehose, predictive marketing decision tree functionality, new mobile app analytics, and Apple iBeacon support. To complement its marketing cloud solutions, Adobe released an updated version of its digital advertising platform, Media Optimizer, which promises to boost advertising performance through predictive modeling algorithms that forecast and optimize campaigns across channels. 

Adobe is on a promising path, analysts agree. “They’re starting out on an impressive trajectory,” Greenberg says. “I’m hoping we’ll be seeing big things from them.” —Maria Minsker