Adobe To Acquire Workfront For $1.5B, Scooping Up Marketing Management Expertise

The acquisition, slated to close in the fiscal quarter beginning next month, is expected to tie Workfront’s marketing work management platform to Adobe Creative Cloud and Adobe Experience Cloud even tighter that they are currently.

Creativity and marketing technology provider Adobe on Monday said it plans to acquire Workfront, a developer of a work management platform aimed at the marketing community.

The acquisition, which Adobe valued at $1.5 billion, is aimed at bringing Workfront’s technology for helping marketers manage content, plan and track marketing campaigns, and execute workflows to the Adobe Experience Cloud, Adobe said.

The Adobe Experience Cloud is an AI-driven platform for marketing, analytics, advertising, and commerce technologies. It provides tools to help manage, deliver, and optimize marketing experiences; connect all advertising into a single offering for media buying, unlock deep insights from marketing data; and develop a seamless buying experience across multiple vendors.

[Related: NPD Group: Channel Plays Key Role In Digital Transformation]

Lehi, Utah-based Workfront provides a single platform for helping businesses design new products, drive technology transformation, or create global marketing campaigns. The platform can be reconfigured as needed to support any team, region, project, or program across an enterprise.

Adobe and Workfront are no strangers to each other. The two have over 1,000 shared customers who use APIs in the Workfront offerings to take advantage of seamless connections to Adobe Creative Cloud and Adobe Experience Cloud.

The acquisition is expected to close during the first quarter of Adobe’s fiscal year 2021, which starts around December 1.

Workfront CEO Alex Shootman is expected to continue to lead the Workfront team, reporting to Anil Chakravarthy, executive vice president and general manager of Adobe’s digital experience business and worldwide field operations.

Adobe did not respond to a CRN request for more information by press time.

However, in a prepared statement, Chakravarthy called Adobe the leader in content creation, management, delivery, and measurement for digital leaders worldwide.

“The combination of Adobe and Workfront will further accelerate Adobe’s leadership in customer experience management, providing a pioneering solution that spans the entire lifecycle of digital experiences, from ideation to activation,” he said in that statement.