Back from Vegas, exhausted but energized.  Look, I wouldn’t wish a week in Las Vegas on my worst enemy, but the Adobe sales kickoff was outstanding — complete with truly mind bending technology, breakout sessions with comprehensive solution offerings tailored to solving customer pain points, and some inspirational validations of our vision from some of the largest companies on the planet who have engaged Adobe to transform how they reach and converse with their customers online.

And the week started off with a bang.  On Monday, we announced our global partnership with Deloitte to launch the conference.  This agreement is a culmination of several years of mutual commitment and really exemplifies Adobe’s growth in the enterprise software market.  We were also the beneficiary of a couple of outstanding presentations from Mark White, Deloitte CTO, and Paul Clemmons, who took Adobe under his wing a few years back and has been instrumental in nurturing our partnership.  The energy radiating off of the Deloitte team was contagious, but it didn’t stop there.

The interactive agencies, which joined Adobe through our recent DAY Software acquisition, were also blown away.  If I could bottle their energy and sell it…well, let’s just say that it would probably be illegal even in Vegas!  All kidding aside, no company can deliver customer experiences from creative expression to wrapping content into the customer conversation to data insertion from legacy systems to human centric orchestration of process flows to the analytics that arch over the entire experience (and so much more in between).  And these partners paid us back throughout the conference, leading so many great sessions.  So, a huge shout out to Chris and team at Acquity – Dan and his team at SapientNitro – Jens from Logica – and so many other partners.

We truly value and appreciate the impact that our partners have on our business.  From our global network of regional partners to our interactive agency partners to our global SI partnerships, we thank you for your support and the enthusiasm that you expressed around our vision ahead.

So, from the Enterprise Solution Partner team at Adobe, happy holidays, and we’ll see you in Barcelona on January 25^th for what will sure to be another epic Adobe Partner Community Day.  What?  You haven’t registered?  You know what to do – just click on the link below:

http://engagewithadobe.com/

Did not get a chance to attend many sessions – Social Networking panel discussion this morning was interesting, but it is clear that no one quite understands how the growth of social networks is really going to impact corporate behavior. Don Tapscott gave example of Best Buy as a company that really uses the power of Community to drive their customer support – I am going to try to spend some time with the CEO to understand better what their strategy is.

Interesting meetings with the large Indian SIs and outsourcers (Cognizant, TCS) as they are very aggressively investing in more resources and headcount in India. Met with George Colony of Forrester who understands the concept that Adobe is transforming user experience in enterprise applications and wants to hear more.

Most interesting conversation of the day was with Bob Kimmitt of Deloitte, former Deputy Treasury Secretary to Hank Paulson and my boss at Commerce One (President and COO there) – Bob sees a tremendous game of chicken with China coming down the road as they seek to list their companies abroad but aren’t willing to play by the corporate rules of other nations. There is a tremendous polarization that has happened based on Google’s response to China, and it will be interesting to hear more of the discussion tonight at the dinner.

Signing off…

Rob
SVP/GM, Business Productivity Solutions, Adobe

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