Advanced/ Digest...

“I think the Adobe-SAP alliance needs to be seen in the context of the broader SAP-Accenture Marketing Performance Solution,” said Martin Kihn, research director for Gartner. “The vision is for SAP HANA to power an Accenture media mix and analytics platform for marketers, who could use Adobe for the upstream stuff SAP and Accenture don’t do, like site analytics and content management.”

Adobe gains a couple of core competencies as a result of an “iron triangle” with SAP and Accenture such as professional services, custom solutions and implementation strength. “[These capabilities] lend Adobe some heft with the hardcore enterprise quants and CFO skeptics who don’t live in the marketing-driven cultures where Adobe traditionally shines,” Kihn noted.

“Digital marketing has become the ‘it girl,’” as Kihn describes it. Agencies and systems integrators like Accenture, IBM and Deloitte are transforming into digital shops while the advanced analytics players like SAP and FICO are essentially rebranding themselves as “marketing analytics” platforms, he said.

Another potential side effect is the SAP-Accenture partnership further expands the competitive landscape. This is where “Accenture starts to butt heads with the BBDO’s and Wunderman’s – all of those agencies who are the CMO’s advisors,” Kim said.

The dividing lines between technology and systems integrator (or agency, to that effect) will ultimately be about budget, organizational decisions and good, old-fashioned politics. “It remains to be seen which partners in both service and technology will be standing at the end,” Kim said.

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Intermediate/ Digest...

SAP has a global partnership with Adobe to resell the latter’s Marketing Cloud along with SAP’s HANA platform and its hybris Commerce Suite.

Certainly technologies like HANA, the heavy-duty data-management system powering SAP applications that will be packaged with the vendor’s Adobe Marketing Cloud resell, bear this out. HANA essentially presents the ability to process numerous data computations quickly, and while it’s traditionally been used for applications around financial forecasting, it can now power marketing decisions through Adobe Marketing Cloud.

Adobe, for its part, gets access to SAP customers as well as the chance to fill in a hole in its Marketing Cloud portfolio: ecommerce. While Adobe has some ecommerce capabilities through CQ (now a part of its Marketing Cloud Experience Manager solution), it’s not considered a core strength. Instead, it integrated with hybris – owned by SAP since August.

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