Adobe 2015 Annual Report Download - page 13

Table of Contents
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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.
Creative and digital agencies, as well as SIs, are increasingly investing in acquiring their own digital marketing technology
platforms to complement their creative services offerings. Adobe may face competition from these agencies and SIs as they come
to market with best-of-breed offerings in one or more digital marketing capabilities, or if agencies attempt to create a more complete
technology platform offering. 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, audience management, video delivery and monetization 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 of their business, extending from their
use of Creative Cloud, to how they manage, deliver, measure and monetize their content with our Adobe Marketing Cloud.
Print and Publishing
Our Print and Publishing product offerings face competition from large-scale electronic and web publishing systems, XML-
based publishing companies as well as lower-end desktop publishing products. Depending on the product line, competition is
based on a number of factors, including: the quality and features of products, ease-of-use, printer service support, the level of
customization and integration with other publishing system components, the number of hardware platforms supported, service
and price. We believe we can successfully compete based upon the quality and features of our products, our strong brand among
users, the widespread adoption of our products among printer service bureaus, and our extensive application programming interface.
In printing technologies, we believe the principal competitive factors for OEMs in selecting a page description language
or a printing technology are product capabilities, market leadership, reliability, price, support and engineering development
assistance. We believe that our competitive advantages include our technology competency, OEM customer relationships and our
intellectual property portfolio.
OPERATIONS
Marketing and Sales
We market and license our products directly using our sales force and through our own website at www.adobe.com. We
also market and distribute our products through sales channels, which include distributors, retailers, software developers, SIs,
ISVs and VARs, as well as through OEM and hardware bundle customers.
We support our end users through local field offices and our worldwide distribution network, which includes locations in
Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, India, Ireland, Italy, Japan,
Mexico, Moldova, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Singapore, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Sweden,
Switzerland, Taiwan, Turkey, the United Kingdom and the United States.
We sell the majority of our products through a software subscription model where our customers purchase access to a
product for a specific period of time during which they always have rights to use the most recent version of that product. We also
license perpetual versions of our software with maintenance and support, which includes rights to upgrades, when and if available,
support, updates and enhancements.
For fiscal 2015, 2014 and 2013, there were no customers that represented at least 10% of net revenue. In fiscal 2015 and
2014, no single customer was responsible for over 10% of our trade receivables.
Order Fulfillment Distribution
The procurement of the various components of packaged products, including DVDs and printed materials, and the assembly
of packages for retail and other applications products is controlled by our product delivery operations organization. We outsource
our procurement, production, inventory and fulfillment activities to third parties in the United States, Germany and Singapore.
To date, we have not experienced significant difficulties in obtaining raw materials for the manufacture of our products or
in the replication of DVDs, printing and assembly of components.