Adobe 2013 Annual Report Download - page 12

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In addition, we face competition from device, hardware and camera manufacturers as they try to differentiate their offerings
by bundling, for free, their own digital imaging software, or those of our competitors. Similarly, we face potential competition
from operating system manufacturers as they integrate or offer hobbyist-level digital imaging and image management features
with their operating systems. We also face competition from smartphone and tablet manufacturers that integrate imaging and video
software into their devices to work with cameras that come as part of their smartphone and tablet offerings. In addition, new social
networking platforms such as Facebook (including Instagram) and portal sites such as Google and Yahoo! are becoming a direct
means to post, edit and share images, bypassing the step of using image editing and sharing software.
Competition is also emerging with imaging and video applications on smartphone and tablet platforms. Competitors are
extending their products and feature sets to platforms such as Apple’s iPhone and iPad, and other smartphone and tablet devices.
Similarly, new cloud-based offerings continue to emerge which offer image editing and video-editing capabilities, as well as social
and sharing features.
As customers such as publishers and media companies increase their desire to deliver their assets to new platforms such
as mobile devices and tablets, we expect new and existing companies to continue to offer solutions that address these challenges
that are competitive with our Digital Publishing Suite. Many design agencies are building capabilities to offer such solutions, and
companies such as Amazon, Apple and Google offer an alternative format and business model for the delivery of newspaper and
magazine content to mobile devices.
With our Acrobat business, we continue to face competition from Microsoft. Their widely used Office line of products (as
well as open-source alternatives available on the market) enable saving documents as PDF files, competing with Acrobat. Microsoft
also offers a proprietary digital rights management technology and a document format, XML Paper Specification (“XPS”), which
competes with Adobe PDF. Given the dominance of Microsoft’s Office and Office 365 products, features competitive with Adobe’s
Acrobat solutions could harm our overall market opportunity. Our Acrobat product family also faces competition in the PDF file
creation market from many clone products. In addition, other PDF creation solutions can be found at a low cost, or for free, on
the web. To address these competitive threats, we are working to ensure our Adobe Acrobat applications stay at the forefront of
innovation in emerging opportunities such as PDF document generation, document collaboration and document security.
Digital Marketing
The markets in which our Digital Marketing business unit competes are growing rapidly and characterized by intense
competition. Our Adobe Marketing Cloud solutions face competition from large companies such as Google, IBM, Oracle,
salesforce.com, SAP, SAS, Teradata and others, in addition to point product solutions and focused competitors. Additionally, new
competitors are constantly entering these markets. Some of these competitors provide SaaS solutions to customers, generally
through a web browser, while others provide software that is installed by customers directly on their servers. In addition, we
compete at times with our customers’ or potential customers’ internally developed applications. Of the competitors listed, no single
company has products identical to our Adobe Marketing Cloud offerings. Adobe Marketing Cloud competes in a variety of areas,
including: reporting and analytics; cross-channel marketing and optimization; online and social marketing; web experience
management and others.
Many of the companies with which we compete offer a variety of products or services and as a result could also bundle
their products or services, which may result in these companies effectively selling their products or services at or below market
prices for individual products. In addition, large software, internet and database management companies have expanded their
offerings in the digital marketing area, either by developing competing services or by acquiring existing competitors or strategic
partners of ours. We believe competitive factors in our markets include the proven performance, security, scalability, flexibility
and reliability of services; the strategic relationships and integration with third-party applications; the intuitiveness and visual
appeal of user interfaces; demonstrable cost-effective benefits to customers; pricing; the flexibility of services to match changing
business demands; enterprise-level customer service and training; perceived market leadership; the usability of services; real-time
data and reporting; independence from portals and search engines; the ability to deploy the services globally; and success in
educating customers in how to utilize services effectively. We believe we compete favorably with both the enterprise and low-
cost alternatives based on many of these competitive factors including our strong feature set, the breadth of our offerings, our
focus on global, multi-brand companies, our superior user experience, tools for building multi-screen, cross-channel applications,
standards-based architecture, scalability and performance and leadership in industry standards efforts.
We believe our creative tools heritage differentiates us from our competitors. We have worked closely with marketing and
creative customers for over thirty years. We also believe we have leadership in this market, with current customers representing
leading global brands. Our comprehensive solutions extend more broadly than any other company in serving the needs of marketers
and addressing this market opportunity; we integrate content and data, analytics, personalization, web experience management,
cross-channel campaign management and social capabilities in our Adobe Marketing Cloud, surpassing the reach of any competitor.
Most importantly, we provide a vision for our digital marketing customers as we engage with them across the important aspects
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