Extension of Federated Data Access connectors to Hadoop will be significant in the high end of the market, and for Adobe channel partners who work in that space.
A Hadoop workflow in Adobe Campaign
This week at the NRF 2018 retailing show, Adobe made a flurry of announcements enhancing their Adobe Experience Cloud, which unites the Adobe Marketing Cloud, Adobe Advertising Cloud, and Adobe Analytics Cloud. A key one for Adobe channel partners involves Adobe Campaign, part of the Adobe Marketing Cloud. Adobe has expanded its Big Data capabilities in Campaign by adding a connector to the Hadoop open source software framework.
“Solution marketers use Adobe Campaign to plan, launch and execute multi-channel campaigns, said Bruce Swann, a Senior Product Marketing Manager at Adobe focused on Campaign. “What differentiates it in the markets is the number of channel we support, so that a marketer can most effectively plan, launch and measure support in multi-channel campaigns.”
Adobe Campaign is used more broadly than in retailing, but that is its sweet spot.
“It has been widely broader than retailers but has been widely adopted by them,” Swann said. “It is also used by both B2B and B2C marketers in other sectors like travel, hospitality, and financial services.”
Swann said that Campaign has always provided access to data sources stored in external databases with its Federated Data Access connectors. Likewise, it has had Big Data capabilities previously, with support for Amazon Redshift and Pivotal Greenplum.
“While Hadoop is not our first step into Big Data, this is something that our customers has been asking for,” Swann stated. “Historically, we have been very SQL-oriented. This will significantly strengthen Adobe Campaign’s ability to be able to leverage Big Data environments.”
The extension of Federated Data support through this connector gives the marketer access to Hadoop through the Campaign interface, so they can create their own queries and segment data, without having to import datasets.
“Historically, it has been the IT specialists who have had the access to Hadoop, and marketers have been left out of the equation, because they haven’t had the skillset to use it,” Swann said. “This gives them that access.”
The Hadoop connector will have its impact at the high end of the market.
“Adobe Campaign is used by companies in the upper part of the midmarket, but the Hadoop support will be impactful for the bigger brands, because those are the ones who have data lakes and Hadoop clusters,” Swann said.
Swann also indicated that the Hadoop connector will be significant for the Adobe channel.
“Adobe Campaign is very partner friendly, because we rely on partners to implement us within broader solutions, or build apps on top of us,” he said. “For example, a partner who develops a loyalty engine can extend us, because the Experience cloud doesn’t have one. We don’t pretend to do things we don’t do. We know where we start, and where we end.”
