New Digital Enterprise Platform from Adobe

James Fritz

Recently, I spoke with Ben Watson, principal customer experience strategist at Adobe, about his company’s new “Digital Enterprise Platform”. Ben is a well-spoken, sharp guy, easy to listen to, yet it often seemed like he was using a foreign language: ECM, speeds and feeds, ERP, network conditions, RDBMS… I’m afraid I just don’t speak Enterprise.
Still, I’ll try to explain this new Adobe venture as it relates to creative professionals.
Big companies–really big–have the budgets to deliver targeted marketing campaigns in many media, such as print, on the Web and mobile devices, and so on. To justify those big budgets, the companies want to track campaign performance, tweaking the message as needed. They also want to keep tabs on the people who buy the products promoted in the campaign and sell these people even more stuff.
Adobe hopes that its Digital Enterprise Platform (DEP) will make it easier for companies to answer all of those needs more quickly and cheaply than is possible now. DEP relies on Adobe’s Flash Builder and Flex technologies to carry out many of the tasks I described above. The 4.5.1 updates to Flash Builder and Flex give these technologies the ability to develop mobile applications for Android, BlackBerry and iOS platforms. DEP also relies on Adobe’s Scene 7, Omniture, and LiveCycle, and even includes an InDesign plug-in. This plug-in adds a panel to InDesign that helps designers track their tasks and access job-related materials, such as the design brief and sketches.

As with most software packages aimed at the enterprise, the costs are complicated; you’ll have to talk to an Adobe sales person to figure out whether your company can afford it. For now, the Digital Enterprise Platform is still in beta but is accepting a limited number of enterprise customers.
Whew! That’s about the best I can do to explain this new Adobe offering. Click here for the official press release.