Adobe Continues To Grow Enterprise Applications Business

Sean Michael

Updated · Sep 14, 2018

Adobe is moving forward on multiple fronts to grow and improve multiple aspects of its expanding application portfolio.

During Adobe's third quarter fiscal 2018 earnings call on Sept. 13, Adobe's president and CEO, Shantanu Narayen, outlined the success the company has had in the recent quarter and what's coming in the months ahead.

For the quarter, Adobe reported revenue of $2.29 billion for a 24 percent year-over-year gain. Net income for the quarter came in at $666 million, up from $420 million in the third quarter of 2017. All of Adobe's product areas showed growth, including digital media and digital experience.

“In every market around the world, students, creatives, enterprises and governments are choosing Adobe Creative Cloud, Document Cloud and Experience Cloud to deliver the transformative digital experiences required to compete and win today,” Narayen said during his company's earning call.

Creative Cloud provides multiple subscription-based software products including Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign, as well as Adobe's video software, including Premiere Pro, After Effects and Character Animator.

“Creative Cloud has become the creativity platform for all with millions of highly engaged subscribers and a strong base of trialists whom we actively convert each month into paying customers,” Narayen said. “Video continues to be an explosive category. In June, we previewed Project Rush, a new video editing app that makes creating and sharing online video content easier than ever.”

Adobe is also working on a series of new video creation capabilities that benefit from the company's Sensei artificial intelligence that can be used to accelerate video production. Narayen also highlighted the new Adobe XD solution for designing and prototyping websites and apps.

“This quarter, we unveiled new open platform capabilities, which allow users to customize their workflow with a broader ecosystem of community and partner plug-ins,” Narayen said about Adobe XD.

A core part of any enterprise business is dealing with documents, which is another area of strength for Adobe with the Document Cloud. Narayen said that Adobe Document Cloud is the world's leading digital document service, enabling individuals and businesses to automate inefficient paper-based processes.

“PDF creation, sharing, reviewing, scanning and signing is accelerating across devices, and Adobe's document business is experiencing strong growth,” he said. “Over 50 billion PDFs were opened in Adobe products in the last year.”

Narayen hinted at some major improvements coming soon to the Document Cloud in the next few weeks, that will bring new capabilities for PDFs on mobile devices.

Adobe has also recently expanded its business operations with the $1.68 billion acquisition of Magento in June. Narayen said that Magento brings industry-leading commerce capabilities to Adobe Experience Cloud for B2B and B2C customers.

“We delivered the first integrated deployment of Adobe Experience Manager and Magento Commerce Cloud this quarter,” Narayen said. ” Expanding Magento's reach in the global enterprise space continues to be an area of opportunity for Adobe, as is expanding other Experience Cloud solutions deeper into mid-sized businesses where Magento has a strong market position.”

Adobe is likely to have lots more news next month, as the company hosts its Adobe Max user conference in Los Angeles. It gets underway on Oct. 15.

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at EnterpriseAppsToday and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.

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  • Sean Michael
    Sean Michael

    Sean Michael is a writer who focuses on innovation and how science and technology intersect with industry, technology Wordpress, VMware Salesforce, And Application tech. TechCrunch Europas shortlisted her for the best tech journalist award. She enjoys finding stories that open people's eyes. She graduated from the University of California.

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