Performing Strategic

Systems Analysis of
Adobe
-By Lakshay Bahl

Adobe Inc. is an American multinational computer software company headquartered in San

Jose, California, and incorporated in Delaware. It has historically focused upon the creation
of multimedia and creativity software products, with a more recent foray towards digital
marketing software. Adobe is best known for its Adobe Flash web software ecosystem,
Photoshop image editing software, Adobe Illustrator vector graphics editor, Acrobat Reader,
the Portable Document Format (PDF), and Adobe Creative Suite, as well as its successor
Adobe Creative Cloud.

1. What is the structure of the industry in which the firm is located?

The software business is made out of developers, planners, advertisers, dealers, and other
people who make the projects clients need and afterward showcase them and sell them. A few
projects are intended for general use and mass utilization, while different projects are
specially crafted for an organization's needs. PC programming organizations commonly give
programming to a particular specialty or capacity. For instance, a few organizations create
programming for engineers, while others create programming for a traffic light. 

Individuals who work for programming seller organizations center around making items
available to be purchased. These items could be mass promoted for customers, for example,
charge programs, home bookkeeping projects, or home planning programs. Or then again,
they could give venture programming to business specialties, for example, the eatery
business, clinical industry, or explicit offices inside those enterprises. Specialists are self-
employed entities who are recruited by enterprises to help actualize new programming
bundles. Advisors might be people, or they might be an organization with a few specialists to
employ. 

The overall programming industry produced $403 billion in income in 2013, which was
almost a 5 percent expansion over the earlier year, as per the statistical surveying bunch
Gartner. The most widely recognized occupations in the PC programming industry are
programming engineers, programming designers, developers, analyzers or quality control
faculty, programming advertisers, sales reps, and specialized scholars.

1.1What are some of the competitive forces at work in the industry? Are there
new entrants to the industry? What is the relative power of suppliers, customers,
and substitute products and services over prices?

It depends on which cloud. Adobe has 3 clouds. Creative, Document, and

Marketing(Experience) Clouds.
Creative is quite an extensive list but adobe still holds huge market share with these tools.
The document is PDF and Sign. Still market leaders but you will DocuSign and some smaller
e-signature tools out there. PDF has a low competitor number.
Marketing (experience) cloud has the most and the top competitors run along really a subset
of business functions for the marketers using them. Salesforce, SAP, and Oracle are the big
ones while there are point solutions that compete directly at an individual level. Chiefmartech
releases an annual one-sheet list of all the martech tools in the marketplace annually.
Currently, there are over 10k vendors.
 
Adobe faces competition from Corel, wondershare,DXO labs, serif, and Davinci , which
similar products to adobe. there are many other small companies too which make alternatives
to some of the software and services that adobe offers. 
Adobe offers over 50 products and services and above-listed companies manage to cover
only a narrow spectrum of those software. Adobe faces major competition from wondershare
and Davinci in video editing software , From Corel in photo editing softwares . no one
company provides alternatives to every product by Adobe.
Though there are alternatives available to some of their popular products, Adobe charges
premium prices for their software as they have an elegant and user-friendly interface and
offers cloud capabilities as well .
 
1.2 Is the basis of competition quality, price, or brand?
 
Competition faced by Adobe is mainly on two fronts i.e quality and design . for example in
competition with Premier pro, there is Davinci Resolve 16. Davinci Resolve 16 improves on
areas where PP cc lacks like compilation error in premier Pro. Also, it comes at one time cost
option which is better than paying hefty fees to Adobe for Adobe suite and cloud.
 
1.3 What are the direction and nature of change within the industry? From where are the
momentum and change coming?
 
The nature of change in the Creative software market is gradual. Adobe is not losing
significant market share, even after pricing its software in the premium category, they make
high profits. Although, as seen above good alternatives are available, still Creators prefer to
use both adobe software and alternatives both rather than completely shifting to alternatives.
Change is in the creative software for mobile phones, there applications like PicsArt and
PixelLAB are used more and Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom for mobile are unable to
provide same quality of experience and features.
Also when it comes to video editing in Mobile, Adobe has no competent software available.
 
1.4 How is the industry currently using information technology? Is the organization behind or
ahead of the industry in its application of information systems?
 
Abode is a Creative software and cloud company, their use of information Technology is
quite extensive. It offers Adobe Suite to users as a monthly subscription and their use IT goes
from providing users the cloud service to save their projects, Providing access to servers to
download Applications included in the suite to providing customer support and guidance to
users.
Adobe is ahead of the competition in sense the what they doing in technology is not
something too complex, but it’s just that competitors are not doing what they are doing, and
that is justified too as the customer is required to pay a hefty subscription for those services.
 
 
2. What are the business, firm, and industry value chains for this particular firm?
 
1. Inbound logistics
2. Operations
3. Outbound logistics
4. Marketing & sales
5. Services 
As Adobe does not make any physical product first three are not applicable.
 
Adobe’s marketing targets designers and developers. People who use their products daily.
The excellence of products have developed a community where people collaborate together ,
have conferences and offer a huge potential to learn and grow .
The strong product line up and equally strong community and support is present . which itself
markets the products .
As far as services go , Adobe is a company which provides customer support , forums and
cloud services 
 
2.1 How is the company creating value for the customer—through lower prices and
transaction costs or higher quality? Are there any places in the value chain where the business
could create more value for the customer and additional profit for the company?
 
Adobe creates value through its Adobe suite , a set of high quality applications , where there
is software for any creative purpose and which is used by beginners to professionals . having
support of a wide community and forums . Once you are used to Adobe’s high quality
softwares , it is very difficult to switch to some other software.
In short term Adobe can maximise its profits by introducing an option for one time payment
for their services along with subscription based approach . Many professional creators will
opt for that option as subscription based comes out to be very expensive in long term . this
move will be beneficial for loyal customers of Adobe and will result in cash influx in short
term . 
 
2.2 Does the firm understand and manage its business processes using the best practices
available? Is it taking maximum advantage of supply chain management, customer
relationship management, and enterprise systems?
 
Adobe is not a single software, but there are many software products that are built at Adobe.
And hence there are many languages that are used based on the product. Think of a tech, it
must be used somewhere at Adobe.
It will be unfair to name just one.
To list some of them

1. Java and related technologies for backend systems and microservices.

2. C and C++ for many core systems since they existed even before java. Some
uses core OS functionalities and hence C works better.
3. PHP and related technologies for backend systems and microservices.
4. Python, Java, R for AI , ML and other systems including web services.
5. Scala, Java, Python for Big Data Processing in Spark, Map-Reduce, etc
6. Javascript - React JS, Angular and others
7. Misc - Go, Scala, and many others

Yes adobe uses CRM and ERP , infact Adobe has their own version of ERP know as Adobe
sign 2020.
Adobe's Marketing Cloud is an enterprise customer relationship management (CRM)
platform that enables users to manage the sales, marketing and customer support facets of
their customer engagement strategies. With Adobe Marketing Cloud's integrated CRM tools,
tasks are made more efficient
 
2.3 Does the firm leverage its core competencies?
 
Adobe’s core competencies include its software and its services. The company is able to
provide distinctive products, services and solutions to its customers worldwide for their
various needs. The products that Adobe delivers makes customer experiences fun and make
their creative side thrive. The software that the company provides are some of the most used
and recognized software in the world and cannot be imitated to work the same way or give
users the same experience they would have when using Adobe software. Adobe has great
talent as well including creative developers with their own core competencies and software
engineers. The company is also very flexible as it dabbles in marketing, broadcasting,
publishing, retail, financial services, and media and provides solutions and software for these
trades.
 
2.4 Is the industry supply chain and customer base changing in ways that benefit or harm the
firm?
 
Customer base has wide customer base and they offer a subscription based model . customer
base is changing in numbers, they are increasing, but the as far type of customer is concerned,
Adobe offers such a wide variety of applications in their Suite that all types of customers are
covered who are involved in creating art.
This is benefiting the firm as the subscription-based model is doing good for the company.
they made nearly 12 Billion dollars in Revenue from it last year. 
 
2.5 Can the firm benefit from strategic partnerships, value webs, ecosystems, or platforms?
Adobe needs to keep up the momentum of broadening its customer base and supporting

company-wide business. This is how they can continue transitioning out of their last-era

mindset.

Adobe can continue growing by acquiring other excellent design and optimization analytics

tools and incorporating them into their existing suite of products:

Acquire more UX/design tools: To keep winning in this space, Adobe needs to acquire

other UX tools, such as InVision. Tools like this are more focused on web and mobile app

design than Adobe’s traditional suite of products. InVision’s Studio, which they’ve

positioned to be a Photoshop competitor, is specifically designed for the “modern design

workflow” with advanced animation and responsive design features. It’s extremely user-

friendly and has a lot of potential use cases, like presentations, collaborative workflow

design, and project management. InVision also has plans to expand even further and release

an app store. If Adobe were to acquire InVision, they’d not only knock out the threat of

competition but also widen the top of their funnel with a strong product addition.

Provide more point solution tools: Point solutions, like the digital design toolkit Sketch, are

for extremely lightweight use cases. Sketch has been described as “a reductionist version of

Photoshop, baked down to just what you need to draw stuff on a screen.” A point solution

like this works well with the subscription billing service that Adobe has been transitioning to
because it allows companies to try out lightweight products. Adobe could acquire point

solution tools like Sketch—or they could continue building out point cloud solutions like

eSignature. Giving users more ways to try out small slices of the Adobe suite—in a

commitment-free way, with a subscription plan—could help attract people who were never

before interested in Adobe’s powerful, but expensive and complex, tools.

Acquire next-generation analytics companies: The analytics space is adjacent to web

design. Adobe has already taken a stab into this field by acquiring Omniture, but they have

the potential to expand even more with a greater range of tools if they acquire other forward-

thinking analytics companies. For example, a company like Amplitude focuses on features

that help people understand user behavior, ship iterations quickly, and measure results. This

would be a perfect complement to Adobe’s web design tools. It would help designers who are

already using Adobe products and attract analysts and product marketers who work alongside

the designers.

2.6 Where in the value chain will information systems provide the greatest value to the firm?

Services and customer support is the vertical of Value chain where Information systems will

provide the greatest value to firm. Developing a system to process frequently asked

questions, queries, and error reports, and logs. problem is that even after developing High-

quality software, the user base of the softwares is so widespread that because of different use

cases of different users the software suffers issues of robustness, this can be improved by

using information systems by collecting the data of errors .

3. Have we aligned IT with our business strategy and goals?

• Have we correctly articulated our business strategy and goals?

• Is IT improving the right business processes and activities to promote this

strategy?

• Are we using the right metrics to measure progress toward those goals?
Yes, we have aligned IT with our goals  towards the improvement of the usual process of the

company which will help the company in value creation as well as increased user satisfaction.

Business strategy articulated by use of information technology leads the company towards

growth , both as a company as well as providing better utility to users.

Yes IT plays the major role in implementing strategies discussed above . it is through

Information technology we are able to gain useful insights that will help our company to

progess. Information technology stands at the centre in our business strategy and other factors

are adjusted according to it