Adobe Inc. (NASDAQ:ADBE) has announced that it will acquire marketing workflow management startup, Workfront for $1.5 billion. The acquisition will add a collaboration tool to Adobe’s marketing software by fitting into the Experience Cloud to provide more offerings to companies as employees work remotely.
Workfront to enhance Adobe’s Experience Cloud
Established in 2001, Workfront has raised around $375 million to date, and $280 million of the funds were raised in 2019. A deal for its acquisition is likely to close between December 2020 and February 2021. According to a statement from Adobe, the Lehi, Utah-based Workfront will bring its 1 million users and 3,000 corporate clients to the Photoshop software maker.
Adobe Experience Cloud VP of platform and product, Suresh Vittal said that the two companies usually work together and their sales teams often encounter each other. With the pandemic playing out, it became evident that bringing in-house such kind of tooling which works in a distributed environment could make sense. Vittal said the new standard distributed delivery teams, distributed marketing team and with people working remotely the company saw the emergence of new use cases. The new use cases are around work management, around content velocity and the idea of provision of compliance and governance capabilities, ensuring no asset escapes the organization.
Workfront is Adobe’s 5th largest acquisition
According to Bloomberg data, Workfront becomes the fifth largest acquisition of Adobe. It will be the first significant purchase by executive vice president Anil Chakravarthy who joined the company early this year. In an interview, Chakravarthy said that Workfront and Adobe share around 1,000 mutual clients and most of their customers have been investing in digital marketing. He said that clients want enhanced efficiency out of digital marketing.
Alex Shootman, Workfront’s CEO, views the transaction as a way of accelerating the roadmap with a larger company. He said that their impact in marketing is small, and with the acquisition, it could grow considerably. The acquisition will help clients in managing marketing project marketing complexities by enabling them to schedule and manage work orders that have become complex with the pandemic.