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Irina Guseva

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Adobe MAX 2011 impressions: WEM and DAM out of focus

13-Oct-2011

Tags: Digital and Media Asset Management, Web Analytics, Web Content and Experience Management, Marketplace at Large, Vendor Viability & Financials, , Adobe CQ5 , Adobe Scene7, Omniture SiteCatalyst

Last week I attended the Adobe MAX annual customer conference in Los Angeles. My primary interest revolved around WCM/WEM and DAM, and checking out how the acquisitions of Day Software and Omniture are getting integrated. To remind you, we cover Adobe's CQ5 product in our WCM evaluations, and CQ DAM and Scene7 in our DAM report.

One thing Adobe does well is embracing design and creativity. At MAX, the vendor put on an impressive show, unveiled its acquisitions of TypeKit and Nitobi, plans for Creative Cloud, touch apps, plus a slew of other announcements, and gave sneak peeks into fascinating things under development by Adobe engineers. Curiously, Adobe didn't mention Flash once in the opening keynote. In the day-two keynote, Flash was finally uttered, but seemingly only when accompanied by AIR or HTML5 in the same sentence.

WEM/CEM and DAM received even fewer mentions.

One thing Adobe doesn't yet do well is enterprise software. Despite being alluring to the creative crowds, Adobe (at this point in time) doesn't seem to have figured out what to do in the WEM space, and allows both Omniture and Day to swim in separate swim lanes, albeit in the same pool. On one hand, it was expected that neither Day nor Omniture would have much presence at MAX – due to the recently announced merger of these two business units, and departure of Rob Tarkoff, former SVP and GM, Digital Enterprise Solutions.

One the other hand, MAX was one of the opportunities for Adobe to show off its WEM and DAM propers, but that didn't quite happen – neither in presentations, nor on the show floor.

When I stopped by the WEM booth and asked a question, the person manning the booth couldn't quite explain what this product does and how it works. "It's something about updating web pages," was the paraphrased answer I got. To be fair, he was standing in for a guy who went to get lunch, but it gives you the sense of depth...

The Creative Suite, ColdFusion, and Digital Publishing Suit booths were swarming. I could get a nice badge on Foursquare if there were check-ins at individual product booths.

Note that I am not suggesting that Day and Omniture product lines and their respective customers are in immediate trouble under the Adobe roof.  Nevertheless, the show displayed a palpable lack of mental and cultural investment. Time will tell if and how this changes.