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The Forrester Wave assessment of digital experience delivery platforms has seen Adobe emerge as the strongest performer on the basis of its current offering and strategy.

The ‘Forrester Wave: Digital Experience Delivery Platforms Q3 2014′ report assessed 11 vendors across two main criteria: strength of current offering and strategy for the future.

Organisations are beginning the journey to unified digital experiences, say the report’s authors, and they’re employing digital experience delivery platforms in order to create and deliver relevant experiences across channels – supporting the entire customer lifecycle in a digitally enabled way.

While overall completeness and adoption was found to be ‘middling’ in this developing market, Adobe was named a pioneer, offering the most complete options.

FEATURED RESOURCE: Download your complimentary copy of the ‘Forrester Wave: Digital Experience Delivery Platforms, Q3 2014′ courtesy of Adobe here »

Skills and cross-functional cooperation were nominated as the biggest pain points that organisations face when it comes to digital experience projects. Those surveyed were asked for their top three pain points, and they said:

• 60%: dividing responsibilities among marketing, IT and the rest of the business,
• 58%: a shortage of appropriate skill sets,
• 51%: funding/budget,
• 31%: finding the right third party,
• 30%: dividing responsibilities between internal groups and third parties,
• 14%: hiring the right candidate, and
• 6%: training.

The report’s authors, Stephen Powers, Mark Grannan, and Anjali Yakkundi of Forrester, say that aggregation strategies appear mostly promising: “Adobe is making the greatest strides on the technical integration of acquisitions, with a vision for a common architecture and user interface,” they wrote.

One of only four vendors categorised as ‘strong performers’, Adobe’s content management and targeting products form the backbone of its capabilities.

It has been able to leverage acquisitions from Day Software, Omniture and others to establish a platform with a broad set of functions. “Its digital experience delivery capabilities include WCM, DAM, targeting, and social. Adobe embeds these as part of a ‘marketing cloud’ that also includes analytics, media optimisation, and campaign management.”

The report notes the common user interface across most of the suite’s components, noting that one exception here is in campaign management, acquired from Neolane.

FEATURED RESOURCE: Download your complimentary copy of the ‘Forrester Wave: Digital Experience Delivery Platforms, Q3 2014′ courtesy of Adobe here »