AEM Moved Content to the Cloud and the Sky Expanded: A History Since January

It may have only been 10 months ago but January 2020 feels like a lifetime ago. It was the month when we lost Kobe Bryant in a tragic helicopter crash. The Los Angeles Lakers legend was an 18-time All-Star and winner of 5 NBA Championships. It was also the month when Brexit was finalized, bringing an end to 47 years of the UK’s participation in the wider European project. Meanwhile, the pandemic was on the radar of most countries yet was still largely confined to Asia.

Over 7,000 miles from China on the east coast of the US, retail’s big show, NRF 2020, was kicking off in the middle of the year. The annual National Retail Federation event is one of the high points in the retail world, and last January, it was where Adobe released Adobe Experience Manager as a Cloud Service – which is a core chunk of the wider Adobe Experience Cloud.

For years, Adobe had been offering Adobe Experience Manager as a content management system, and building broader into a digital asset management solution. And then beginning this January, AEM is now offered as a cloud service!

“Wonderful!” you may be exclaiming. Or “So what?” you may be wondering. Well, this was such a great move into the clouds by Adobe for a number of reasons. So let’s take a look at some of the added benefits of Adobe Experience Manager as a cloud service:

• It gives you the opportunity to offer customers better personalized experiences with the integration of the content management system and digital asset management
• Enables continuous delivery and continuous integration with no downtime when it comes to updates
• AEM as a cloud service is predominantly security focused, utilizing automated testing and scanning of common issues
• Builds on previous innovations and investments of AEM, while preserving all functionality and use cases
• Reduces significantly the required manual configuration
• Uses automated testing to validate customer code
• Faster at delivering digital content, taking advantage of a built-in content delivery network, as well as other best practices relate to other network layers
• Is optimized for maximum efficiency and resilience in terms of performance topologies
• Functions on a dynamic architecture that is capable of auto-scaling, which removes the pains of infrastructure issues.
• Fully integrated with the whole Adobe Experience Cloud to leverage Adobe’s entire suite of digital solutions.

As you can see, opting for the cloud comes with a skyful of benefits for your whole team from the creatives in marketing to the builders in the dev team.

Rich box of goodies

Adobe Experience Manager is one of the industry leaders for digital experiences, and comes with a heavy supply of out-of-the-box capabilities, the kind that are in high demand among devs and marketeers that handle them, who are able to navigate the platform smoothly and produce powerful and personalized content in a compressed amount of time. 

Loni Stark is Adobe’s senior director of strategy and project marketing, who had this to say: “Adobe Experience Manager as a Cloud Service supercharges organizations’ abilities to create, manage and deliver more campaigns, digital assets and experiences faster than ever before.

“It creates a compelling offer for mid-size companies and enterprises that are increasingly transforming to adopt advanced digital tools but need more simplicity and flexibility to support their changing business models.”

And these advanced digital tools come wrapped up in the box of leading customer experience management (CXM) platforms, key to keeping competitive and bolstering those numbers of customers loyal to the brand.

When Adobe Experience Manager went skyward at NRF 2020, its innovations were exactly what their clients were after, which include 80 of the top 100 online retailers in the country.

And the benefits of AEM as a cloud service keep on rolling. As a cloud-based product, it’s able to deliver all the latest features and launch whole new digital experiences much faster, accelerating the speed at which brands and retailers are able to deliver updates and revamps.

If customer service is all about listening, then let’s listen to Adobe’s. This is what Ben Snyder had to say, who’s the IT Product Owner at Under Armour – a happy user of Adobe Experience Manager: “When the opportunity arose to become an early adopter of Adobe Experience Manager as a Cloud Service, we jumped at the chance due to the scalability of the offering.

“Integration has been seamless. Already our digital asset manager is running on cloud service and the time to upload our new season assets has been massively reduced.”

Over at Esri, the California-based global supplier of geographic info system software, they were also early adopters of AEM as a cloud service. “Becoming an early adopter of Adobe Experience Manager as a cloud service was incredibly attractive to us,” said Steve Schultz, Head of Marketing Technology at Esri. “Instead of dealing with large-scale deployments of software updates to our site, Adobe Experience Manager as a Cloud Service is constantly updating. We think this process of continuous integration offers huge benefits as the risk of errors occurring during deployments is far reduced.”

What their clients have in common is that: 

• They’re big companies that operate around the globe 
• They are present across a wide landscape of touchpoints 
• They require complex solutions for complex needs
• Manage high-volume amounts of products and services
• And power their digital content with personalized experiences 

So it’s no wonder why so many of the biggest and best companies across multiple industries take advantage of the rich and robust Adobe platform which is a travesty to confine it to the realms of a content management system. It is much more than that. And now it’s cloud-based, the strengths of AEM appear to have few limits.

PS: ArganoUV is one of the world’s leading AEM development teams. Contact us to see how we can work together.