Letter from the Workfront CCO (Apr 2021) — What does Adobe’s acquisition of Workfront mean for our customers?

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It’s been a few months since Workfront was acquired by Adobe, and the overwhelming consensus from the media and from industry analysts is that it’s a fantastic match that will benefit both companies and our customers. Some of you have reached out with your thoughts, which I sincerely appreciate. Many of you have expressed enthusiasm as you are customers of both Workfront and Adobe, and can see the potential of the partnership, and some of you have expressed concerns. I wanted to share my perspective on the benefits for not only Workfront customers, but Adobe customers as well. 

I’ll start by saying the people that you have grown to love from Support, Customer Success, Account Management, Professional Services, Training and more are still part of the Workfront family and dedicated to your success. We hope that engaging with Workfront over these last few months has been the same, if not a better experience, than it was prior to our joining Adobe. Expect this to keep getting better.  

Whether you leverage Workfront in your marketing, IT, PMO or new product development organization, there is tremendous value to be had from our deeper integration with Adobe. If you are part of a marketing organization, you are likely already familiar with Workfront's long-standing partnership with Adobe and may even use several other Adobe applications. Expect our integrations and connected experience to continue to grow and improve. Together, Workfront and Adobe uniquely power a marketing system of record by bringing together a connected marketing tech stack and collecting operational data at every step of the work lifecycle.  

If you are one of our many non-marketing customers, I want you to know that the robust work management functionality you have come to rely on is as strong as ever. Every customer, regardless of how they leverage Workfront, will benefit from the enhancements and new features we have planned in our development roadmap.  

With that in mind, here are a few reasons I think the union will be hugely beneficial for you, our customers.  

More time to focus on strategy and creativity. Increasingly, teams are working remotely, across borders and time zones, disconnected from traditional on-premise infrastructures. They might find themselves juggling multiple tools and applications that don’t work well together, and lose precious time toggling between different systems, countless video calls, emails, and instant messages trying to keep the work flowing. In addition, review and approvals often sit outside of the environment where they were created, leading to a lack of visibility, duplication of assets, conflicting feedback, and more. It’s a constant battle between being creative and being productive, or being responsive to requests for changes.  

If you are an Adobe customer, combining Adobe and Workfront provides you access to a single system to support planning, collaboration, and governance that will unlock organizational productivity. 

Efficiency and agility. A few months ago, we talked about the concept of work automation and how it could help solve the efficiency crisis. Nearly every organization struggles with efficiencies on some level. Everyone is trying to get products to market faster while still being innovative. It’s not a surprise when we see over 40% of employees are spending at least a quarter of their week doing repetitive tasks.  

Along these lines, Forrester Analyst Stephanie Liu shared recently with CMS Wire, “For existing Adobe Experience Manager customers who want to couple an enterprise DAM with streamlined content production workflows, Workfront could be the ‘peanut butter to Adobe’s jelly.’ There are synergies in terms of making sure content production requests aren’t duplicative (e.g., pointing to existing content that could fit a creative brief instead of producing net new content).”  

Powerful integrations. I highlighted the connections between Workfront and Adobe Creative Cloud and Adobe Experience Cloud above, but it’s important to note that Workfront has extensive integration capabilities. With Workfront Fusion, customers can easily integrate Workfront to any number of other products. Fusion is a no-code application and a true powerhouse of work automation, allowing you to connect your tech stack to automate workflows and processes.  

When work can flow freely across teams and systems, productivity and efficiency go through the roof. Andrew Koprowski, Senior Associate at LeapPoint recently shared several great examples of how integrations can improve the user experience within Workfront, thereby increasing the ROI of the application itself. He gave several specific use cases for how their clients are automating work processes that eliminate duplicate actions, increase the speed to trigger a process, and reduce clicks to perform specific actions.  

On a personal note, something I've been uniquely impressed with over the last few months is how Adobe's approach to employees and customers is very similar to Workfront’s. It's one of genuine care and compassion. As we integrate with Adobe, I can guarantee that you will always have a partnership with Workfront, and a team of people who want to see you succeed.