Adobe 2012 Annual Report Download - page 5

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The cornerstone of Creative Cloud is our Creative Suite family of products. Consisting of sixteen individual products and
four suites that contain different combinations of these products, we focus on the needs of creative professional customers, which
include graphic designers, production artists, web designers and developers, user interface designers, writers, videographers,
motion graphic artists, prepress professionals, video game developers, mobile application developers, students and administrators.
They use and rely on our solutions for publishing, web design and development, video and animation production, mobile app and
gaming development and document creation and collaboration. They work in businesses ranging from large publishers, media
companies and global enterprises, to smaller design agencies, small and medium-sized businesses and individual freelancers.
Our creative products are used by creative professionals to create much of the printed and on-line information people see,
read and interact with every day, including newspapers, magazines, websites, mobile apps, catalogs, advertisements, brochures,
product documentation, books, memos, reports and banners. Our tools are also used to create and enhance visually rich content,
including video, animation and mobile content, that is created by multimedia, film, television, audio and video producers who
work in advertising, web design, music, entertainment, corporate and marketing communications, product design, user interface
design, sales training, printing, architecture and fine arts. Knowledge workers, educators, hobbyists and high end consumers also
use our creative products to create and deliver content that is of professional level quality.
We believe the innovation we deliver in the tools and solutions our customers use enables the future of digital media. Our
creative solutions are mission-critical to customers such as publishers, advertisers and media companies; they rely on Adobe tools
and technologies to create highly compelling content, deliver it across diverse media and devices, and then optimize it through
systematic targeting and measurement. For example:
• Publishers around the world are striving to embrace the digital age to build distinctive brands, develop sustainable
business strategies, achieve greater profitability, and deliver optimized content to fragmented audiences on an expanding
array of smartphones, tablets, e-readers, and other devices. Their audiences seek compelling, media-rich experiences,
wherever they go, using their preferred devices. The advent of app stores is enabling publishers to reach these audiences
in easy, more effective and affordable ways, through the delivery of apps and content via online subscription services
to their readers and customers.
• Advertisers face an ever-shifting media landscape. Traditional media are giving way to the emergence of new digital
channels such as mobile devices and social networks. Customers have greater choice in where they go for their preferred
brands, making it harder for marketers to keep audiences engaged. Successful advertising increasingly requires
compelling content and greater focus on data and analytics than ever before in order to optimize advertising for improved
targeting and higher returns.
The challenges facing customers such as these not only exist in how they create and deliver their content, but also in how
they manage, measure and optimize their content. Adobe's value proposition extends beyond our historical focus on content creation
to other critical aspects of our customers' workflow, with how we can integrate the capabilities of our analytics and web optimization
solutions, as well as our other digital marketing solutions. These are discussed later in the “Digital Marketing Opportunity” section.
In the second quarter of fiscal 2011, we released CS5.5. At that time we also introduced a monthly subscription offering.
This lower upfront fee, as opposed to the higher upfront perpetual license fee, provides cost-sensitive new users access to our
products, as well as enabled users of older versions of our products to migrate to the latest versions at a lower upfront cost. The
subscription offering also enabled users to have immediate access to software updates and new innovations that we implemented
in our creative products in between release dates of the products.
Given our success in attracting new and existing customers to our initial subscription offering, combined with our offering
of cloud-based services as a means to deliver more value to our users, we announced Creative Cloud in October 2011 and in the
second quarter of fiscal 2012, we delivered the initial release of our new Creative Cloud subscription offering. As part of Creative
Cloud, we also delivered Creative Suite 6 (“CS6”), which is the newest release of our creative toolset. CS6 provides numerous
feature enhancements, particularly in the areas of mobile device content creation, website development with new HTML5
capabilities, digital imaging, digital publishing for tablets and product performance. Customers obtained CS6 capabilities through
both our historical perpetual licensing model as well as through our new subscription-based model.
A key benefit of our Creative Cloud offering is the rapid delivery of additional products and product updates to subscribers
as soon as these products and updates become available. Examples of additional value provided to customers through Creative
Cloud since its initial release included the delivery of new features for Adobe Illustrator users, new enhancements for web designers
and an updated version of Adobe Acrobat. In addition, new products and capabilities were made available to Creative Cloud
subscribers that were not made available to licensees of the perpetual products. Adobe Lightroom, our popular image editing and
photo management tool, was delivered as an additional enhancement to Creative Cloud subscribers in the summer of 2012, and
new HTML5 content creation capabilities were delivered through the release of our new Adobe Edge Animate product and related
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