4 ms·

Adobe to buy Omniture for $1.8 billion

50 points by ojbyrne 17y ago

hypermatt 17y ago
This buyout doesn't make a ton of sense. Hopefully adobe is buying it to make the flash integration better since ad tracking is so important and omniture never worked great with flash.
vibhavs 17y ago
I definitely didn't see this one coming.
mbreese 17y ago
I know Adobe, but I don't know Omniture. This may be a dumb question, but what do they do? And how does this mesh with Adobe's product line? Based upon initial comments, it looks like this may be the bigger question.
- mikeryan 17y ago
  Omniture's main product is web analytics software (a hosted solution) They're trying to move that model into more traditional apps as well. Like tracking flash or AIR apps, they even do some analytics on some connected game consoles. On the surface its a strange fit.
  - imajes 17y ago
    Yeah, no kidding. Plus, adobe doesn't seem to have the money up front- remember, they asked their staff to take unpaid vacation this year-- this seems like a very strange way to say 'screw you' to their investors.
    - asdlfj2sd33 17y ago
      3 weeks unpaid time off, if my recollection is correct. And then they go spend that kind of cash on an acquisition, I doubt it will create a lot of good will inside the company.
      - dschobel 17y ago
        I know a few companies which have cut benefits to their employees while at the same time acquiring other companies and it makes perfect sense. 1) It's a buyers market because a lot of companies are looking for an out even at reduced valuation. 2) Employees are similarly not going anywhere in a climate like this so you can cut benefits for the time being because everyone is cutting benefits. Look at the acquisitions as a long term investment whereas the reduced benefits are a band-aid.
        aaronblohowiak 17y ago
        "makes perfect sense" -- if you don't mind really high turnover when "good times" return AND low productivity for your captive employees.
        dschobel 17y ago
        you're assuming that the companies won't reassess when the situation recovers. that's why I specifically said 'band-aid' as in a temporary measure. and when the benefit reductions are in lieu of lay-offs, morale shouldn't be affected. people should be far-sighted enough to realize that everyone has to scale back. if the companies don't readjust later then it goes without saying (or so I thought...) that they will lose employees. the bottom line is that there is good sense in it.
        aaronblohowiak 17y ago
        "when the benefit reductions are in lieu of lay-offs, morale shouldn't be affected" -- in isolation, i agree. I think good will is easily lost and hard to re-earn, and spending a ton of cache while asking people to cut back is pretty harsh in my book. "if the companies don't readjust later" .. i don't think people forget so soon. Also, the most effective people still have options in the downturn and are the ones you really can't afford to lose. Mergers are really hard to get right, and you need buy-in from on high all the way down through the effected organization. The bottom line is that you need to account for the ill will internally when you are considering making a decision like this. It may very well be the optimal choice for increasing short-term shareholder value, which is a publicly traded company's number 1 priority. Now, if Adobe also announced that they'd pay doubletime for vacation for employees that took the unpaid time off and stuck it out, that'd be a Good Thing.
  - seiji 17y ago
    Adobe explains it as: http://www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/invrelations/images/omgraphic.jpg http://www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/invrelations/images/omgraphi...
    - mikeryan 17y ago
      Yah I understand where it fits in their value chain - I'm not saying that this is a bad acquisition for Adobe - its just a bit strange. Here's why its strange to me. The web analytics space is very competitive and not very defensible. 1.8B for a company seems like a lot of money to spend when there are likely many smaller players that could be gotten for less. Even as I write this though here's why I could see it making sense. 1. If Omniture is profitable. So you don't really lose too much if the investment pays itself back. (edit: they're not right now, but their stock is at about 1/2 where it was at the end of 07 so it could be considered a value?) 2. If Omniture is way ahead in the app tracking space. Web traffic isn't really new, but app tracking for Flash and other types of apps isn't as crowded a space, Omniture _might_ lead by leaps at this. 3. Turns on the Adobe as a service model. Adobe isn't a company with a lot month over month service revenues. Omniture fills this gap nicely.
      - rgrieselhuber 17y ago
        Omniture has diversified quite a bit in the last few years and has a decent suite of solutions for a full range of business / content optimization problems. I think this, combined with Omniture's appeal to large corporations who understand that web analytics done properly is more than just throwing a ga.js tag on your page, was one of the major motivating factors for Adobe. Adobe is primarily about creating a consistent user experience across multiple channels. Large content production teams driven primarily by creative energies still struggle with using data-driven optimization, but this is going to be a competitive differentiator for teams that can do it well. This move helps Adobe adapt to this new game with arguably the strongest analytics data provider in the market.
      - netsp 17y ago
        Omniture has large customers. It might have something to do with that. * I'm not sure if this is related at all as it is a lot smaller. Adobe recently purchased Business Catalyst, a hosted CMS that differentiates itself by combining CMS, CRM & Analytics. It might be a general strategy of services that replace custom or patched together solutions with hosted solutions. Adobe has a general strategy of eventually bringing together products to work together.
- jhancock 17y ago
  I love it when a company you've never heard of gets acquired at these huge valuations. Its the type of motivational story that works for me.
  - jonknee 17y ago
    Well they are a publicly traded company (OMTR) so it wasn't like the valuation came out of nowhere and the founders have already had their payday (though they have kept plenty of stock around). It was a 24% premium on share price or so.
    - jhancock 17y ago
      I understand. There are plenty of public companies that are not well known outside their niche. This is the part that is motivating: a big company can be successful and relatively unknown. To compare and scale down my feelings on this to my latest startup, I have zero desire for recognition outside my target user. There will be no HN "check this out" posts, no begging outlets like TechCrunch to cover me...these should be a waste of energy for my approach to work.
  - akd 17y ago
    The fact that you've never heard of Omniture says more about you than it does about Omniture or Adobe.
    - modoc 17y ago
      shrug It just says he hasn't worked with any really big web shops. Almost all the Fortune 1000's I've worked with have used it. None of the smaller folks have.
zaidf 17y ago
I really respect Adobe for its acquisition acumen.
frig 17y ago
Hypothesis: adobe is the content-creation-tools company (and has flash). Omniture+Adobe leads to: deeply integrated content+analytics, eg the ability to author web or flash content with very fine-grained data capture and analytics.
- callmeed 17y ago
  That's a lot money to spend on an analytics platform for Flash. I can see that it might be big for video analytics (since most web video is Flash/FLV), but ... Perhaps Adobe is hedging it's bet on Flash being a dominant web platform in the future? ... maybe they have plans for other (HTML5?) web publishing products/services?
  - frig 17y ago
    It is if it's just that. I was thinking it'd be also like pdf and that other format adobe's been working on for ebooks (basically similar to pdf but better about reflowing text for different screen sizes) would wind up having fine grained analytics platforms built in (obviously in supported readers only) @ the chapter and paragraph levels or whatnot. That kind of thing.
amadiver 17y ago
Maybe Adobe will invest a few bucks in making the code/documentation behind Omniture's tracking system less like beholding something from an H.P. Lovecraft novel.
- bonaldi 17y ago
  Yep, the marketdroids running Adobe are definitely going to invest money in R&D and improving their code. Look at CS4! Oh, right. Definitely seems like a baffling move from the outside, but to be honest virtually everything Adobe's done in the past few years has been bizarre and counter-productive. Frustrating, because skunkworks projects like Lightroom (sorry, Adobe Photoshop Lightroom) show that the engineering heart of the company beats on. It's just got arteries clogged with bullshit, nonsense and Flash.
  - seldo 17y ago
    I agree with everything, except that I think Flash is also a great product. FutureSplash Animator (oh, those were the days) was a revolutionary product that blew the crap out of the only other web multimedia solution at the time (which was Shockwave). It was vector based (truly revolutionary in 1996!), small, fast even on computers of the time. Even after the acquisition by Macromedia, the introduction of simple video streaming to Flash completely changed the economics and hence the popularity of online video, which produced YouTube, Hulu, and other game-changer online companies. Since the second acquisition (by Adobe), Flash has been buried under the mountain of bullshit you've mentioned, but Flash was and is a great product, as evidenced by its ubiquity -- 98% of desktops in the world have Flash installed, more than have Microsoft Windows. Pretty amazing stuff.
    - bonaldi 17y ago
      There are a lot of great products in the Adobe stable -- Photoshop defined an industry, InDesign has redefined one, PDF revolutionised a lot of things (storming barricades put up by Postscript, which is also an Adobe product). The problem is that Adobe's dreadful stewardship means they all go to bloatware shit in the end. Flash may have been a great product, but it certainly isn't anymore. And its ubiquity simply shows the popularity of things people have done with it -- video being the big driver -- and doesn't prove that it is "great", any more than the number of Windows seats prove its greatness. The Flash runtime on the Mac is so poor that even their Flash PR-blogger suggests you get a flashblocker (there are also rumours that ClickToFlash was originally an inside job -- thanks for taking pity on us!) to deal with it. All the while he protests that Adobe doesn't need to do anything to improve it to deal with the challenges of HTML 5, because only "minority" browser vendors care about that, and IE will always be king. He'd better hope so.
startingup 17y ago
What this acquisition demonstrates is that there is a lot of established vendors who have cash burning a hole in their pocket, but no organic sources of growth. Years of bureaucratic culture - I would have said marketing culture but Apple does marketing well, so it would be a disservice to real marketeers to call Adobe's a marketing culture - has destroyed the technology soul of the company. Result: clueless management goes and overpays, aided and abetted by investment bankers (public) or VCs (private). This disease abounds in the industry. Sun overpaid for a series of companies over a 7 year period; Intuit has acquired and done nothing with a whole lot of them; the less said about Yahoo the better; and VMWare + SpringSource ($400 million?) ... I guess there is hope for a lot of start-ups yet ;-)
- netsp 17y ago
  Adobe has a reasonable good record with acquisitions.
  - paraschopra 17y ago
    Yup, the acquisition of Macromedia comes to my mind. They have leveraged that pretty well.
dtap 17y ago
It is good to see the M&A activity picking up. Zappos, Mint, now Omniture. The fact that companies can get enough cash to make acquisitions is a good sign the worst is behind us.
chaosmachine 17y ago
Hm, $1.8 billion. That's roughly 2.5 million copies of Photoshop CS4.
- Tichy 17y ago
  That's not even that much... (2.5 million I mean).
SwellJoe 17y ago
This strikes me as a poor fit, way too expensive, and betting on the future of the Internet playing out in ways that are bad for open standards and thus bad for consumers. Betting on bad outcomes for consumers is a dangerous business. Every major player except Adobe wants to see changes to how video and rich content are delivered on the web, and some of those changes (the standards-based ones like HTML video) tend to align with what consumers want (more widespread availability of video and rich content on their phones, netbooks, other operating systems, etc.)...and this acquisition is betting that Flash and Adobe content delivery mechanisms will become more important to the web ecosystem in the future. $1.8 billion is an awful lot to spend on something that seems very likely to decline in importance going forward. Of course, I could be misunderstanding Omniture's value and how diverse their products are. Their website is a bit vague and confusing. Then again, I don't have an MBA, so I might just be missing something.
- netsp 17y ago
  betting on the future of the Internet playing out in ways that are bad for open standards I understand why you think adobe is betting against open standards and against consumers, but why do you think that this move is doing that? BTW, I am definitely not an expert on this matter, but it seems to me that people can get pretty dogmatic about standards. Adobe managed to get more options in to most people's browsers in a way that works. Even standards might benefit from a little competition. way too expensive Can you elaborate? Stock is at a relative low. Omniture's revenue is about 1/6 of sale price (they are not profitable, but they are growing). This strikes me as a poor fit I don't know a huge amount about this company, but judging by their income statement, they seem like a services company at least as much as a product development one. - 31-Dec-08 31-Dec-07 31-Dec-06 Revenue 295,613 143,127 79,749 Cost of Revenue 125,940 53,364 31,826 Research Development 36,966 17,257 8,732 Selling General & Admin175,851 85,828 47,334 The interesting thing is that Adobe has bought a company that looks like it is primarily a consulting/customisation/sales company.
  - SwellJoe 17y ago
foulmouthboy 17y ago
To me, this is Adobe's play at being everything that it takes to build websites. Start with the tools and popular platforms and move right into the measurement and optimization.
zaidf 17y ago
I don't know too much about Omniture. But I recently met the chief of online marketing of Lenovo and after much prodding about how big companies manage their marketing, he told me they all use Omniture.
paraschopra 17y ago
I think Adobe has bought Omniture's sales fleet, not its technology. Omniture sales team has significant reach across all big publishers on the web. Almost every big player knows or has used Omniture's testing, targeting or analytics solutions. Adobe may well utilize that reach to cross-sell its proprietary technology.

50 points by ojbyrne 17y ago

This buyout doesn't make a ton of sense. Hopefully adobe is buying it to make the flash integration better since ad tracking is so important and omniture never worked great with flash.

vibhavs 17y ago

I definitely didn't see this one coming.

mbreese 17y ago

I know Adobe, but I don't know Omniture. This may be a dumb question, but what do they do? And how does this mesh with Adobe's product line? Based upon initial comments, it looks like this may be the bigger question.

mikeryan 17y ago
Omniture's main product is web analytics software (a hosted solution) They're trying to move that model into more traditional apps as well. Like tracking flash or AIR apps, they even do some analytics on some connected game consoles. On the surface its a strange fit.
- imajes 17y ago
  Yeah, no kidding. Plus, adobe doesn't seem to have the money up front- remember, they asked their staff to take unpaid vacation this year-- this seems like a very strange way to say 'screw you' to their investors.
  - asdlfj2sd33 17y ago
    3 weeks unpaid time off, if my recollection is correct. And then they go spend that kind of cash on an acquisition, I doubt it will create a lot of good will inside the company.
    - dschobel 17y ago
      I know a few companies which have cut benefits to their employees while at the same time acquiring other companies and it makes perfect sense. 1) It's a buyers market because a lot of companies are looking for an out even at reduced valuation. 2) Employees are similarly not going anywhere in a climate like this so you can cut benefits for the time being because everyone is cutting benefits. Look at the acquisitions as a long term investment whereas the reduced benefits are a band-aid.
      - aaronblohowiak 17y ago
        "makes perfect sense" -- if you don't mind really high turnover when "good times" return AND low productivity for your captive employees.
        dschobel 17y ago
        you're assuming that the companies won't reassess when the situation recovers. that's why I specifically said 'band-aid' as in a temporary measure. and when the benefit reductions are in lieu of lay-offs, morale shouldn't be affected. people should be far-sighted enough to realize that everyone has to scale back. if the companies don't readjust later then it goes without saying (or so I thought...) that they will lose employees. the bottom line is that there is good sense in it.
        aaronblohowiak 17y ago
        "when the benefit reductions are in lieu of lay-offs, morale shouldn't be affected" -- in isolation, i agree. I think good will is easily lost and hard to re-earn, and spending a ton of cache while asking people to cut back is pretty harsh in my book. "if the companies don't readjust later" .. i don't think people forget so soon. Also, the most effective people still have options in the downturn and are the ones you really can't afford to lose. Mergers are really hard to get right, and you need buy-in from on high all the way down through the effected organization. The bottom line is that you need to account for the ill will internally when you are considering making a decision like this. It may very well be the optimal choice for increasing short-term shareholder value, which is a publicly traded company's number 1 priority. Now, if Adobe also announced that they'd pay doubletime for vacation for employees that took the unpaid time off and stuck it out, that'd be a Good Thing.
- seiji 17y ago
  Adobe explains it as: http://www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/invrelations/images/omgraphic.jpg http://www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/invrelations/images/omgraphi...
  - mikeryan 17y ago
    Yah I understand where it fits in their value chain - I'm not saying that this is a bad acquisition for Adobe - its just a bit strange. Here's why its strange to me. The web analytics space is very competitive and not very defensible. 1.8B for a company seems like a lot of money to spend when there are likely many smaller players that could be gotten for less. Even as I write this though here's why I could see it making sense. 1. If Omniture is profitable. So you don't really lose too much if the investment pays itself back. (edit: they're not right now, but their stock is at about 1/2 where it was at the end of 07 so it could be considered a value?) 2. If Omniture is way ahead in the app tracking space. Web traffic isn't really new, but app tracking for Flash and other types of apps isn't as crowded a space, Omniture _might_ lead by leaps at this. 3. Turns on the Adobe as a service model. Adobe isn't a company with a lot month over month service revenues. Omniture fills this gap nicely.
    - rgrieselhuber 17y ago
      Omniture has diversified quite a bit in the last few years and has a decent suite of solutions for a full range of business / content optimization problems. I think this, combined with Omniture's appeal to large corporations who understand that web analytics done properly is more than just throwing a ga.js tag on your page, was one of the major motivating factors for Adobe. Adobe is primarily about creating a consistent user experience across multiple channels. Large content production teams driven primarily by creative energies still struggle with using data-driven optimization, but this is going to be a competitive differentiator for teams that can do it well. This move helps Adobe adapt to this new game with arguably the strongest analytics data provider in the market.
    - netsp 17y ago
      Omniture has large customers. It might have something to do with that. * I'm not sure if this is related at all as it is a lot smaller. Adobe recently purchased Business Catalyst, a hosted CMS that differentiates itself by combining CMS, CRM & Analytics. It might be a general strategy of services that replace custom or patched together solutions with hosted solutions. Adobe has a general strategy of eventually bringing together products to work together.
jhancock 17y ago
I love it when a company you've never heard of gets acquired at these huge valuations. Its the type of motivational story that works for me.
- jonknee 17y ago
  Well they are a publicly traded company (OMTR) so it wasn't like the valuation came out of nowhere and the founders have already had their payday (though they have kept plenty of stock around). It was a 24% premium on share price or so.
  - jhancock 17y ago
    I understand. There are plenty of public companies that are not well known outside their niche. This is the part that is motivating: a big company can be successful and relatively unknown. To compare and scale down my feelings on this to my latest startup, I have zero desire for recognition outside my target user. There will be no HN "check this out" posts, no begging outlets like TechCrunch to cover me...these should be a waste of energy for my approach to work.
- akd 17y ago
  The fact that you've never heard of Omniture says more about you than it does about Omniture or Adobe.
  - modoc 17y ago
    shrug It just says he hasn't worked with any really big web shops. Almost all the Fortune 1000's I've worked with have used it. None of the smaller folks have.

zaidf 17y ago

I really respect Adobe for its acquisition acumen.

frig 17y ago

Hypothesis: adobe is the content-creation-tools company (and has flash). Omniture+Adobe leads to: deeply integrated content+analytics, eg the ability to author web or flash content with very fine-grained data capture and analytics.

callmeed 17y ago
That's a lot money to spend on an analytics platform for Flash. I can see that it might be big for video analytics (since most web video is Flash/FLV), but ... Perhaps Adobe is hedging it's bet on Flash being a dominant web platform in the future? ... maybe they have plans for other (HTML5?) web publishing products/services?
- frig 17y ago
  It is if it's just that. I was thinking it'd be also like pdf and that other format adobe's been working on for ebooks (basically similar to pdf but better about reflowing text for different screen sizes) would wind up having fine grained analytics platforms built in (obviously in supported readers only) @ the chapter and paragraph levels or whatnot. That kind of thing.

amadiver 17y ago

Maybe Adobe will invest a few bucks in making the code/documentation behind Omniture's tracking system less like beholding something from an H.P. Lovecraft novel.

bonaldi 17y ago
Yep, the marketdroids running Adobe are definitely going to invest money in R&D and improving their code. Look at CS4! Oh, right. Definitely seems like a baffling move from the outside, but to be honest virtually everything Adobe's done in the past few years has been bizarre and counter-productive. Frustrating, because skunkworks projects like Lightroom (sorry, Adobe Photoshop Lightroom) show that the engineering heart of the company beats on. It's just got arteries clogged with bullshit, nonsense and Flash.
- seldo 17y ago
  I agree with everything, except that I think Flash is also a great product. FutureSplash Animator (oh, those were the days) was a revolutionary product that blew the crap out of the only other web multimedia solution at the time (which was Shockwave). It was vector based (truly revolutionary in 1996!), small, fast even on computers of the time. Even after the acquisition by Macromedia, the introduction of simple video streaming to Flash completely changed the economics and hence the popularity of online video, which produced YouTube, Hulu, and other game-changer online companies. Since the second acquisition (by Adobe), Flash has been buried under the mountain of bullshit you've mentioned, but Flash was and is a great product, as evidenced by its ubiquity -- 98% of desktops in the world have Flash installed, more than have Microsoft Windows. Pretty amazing stuff.
  - bonaldi 17y ago
    There are a lot of great products in the Adobe stable -- Photoshop defined an industry, InDesign has redefined one, PDF revolutionised a lot of things (storming barricades put up by Postscript, which is also an Adobe product). The problem is that Adobe's dreadful stewardship means they all go to bloatware shit in the end. Flash may have been a great product, but it certainly isn't anymore. And its ubiquity simply shows the popularity of things people have done with it -- video being the big driver -- and doesn't prove that it is "great", any more than the number of Windows seats prove its greatness. The Flash runtime on the Mac is so poor that even their Flash PR-blogger suggests you get a flashblocker (there are also rumours that ClickToFlash was originally an inside job -- thanks for taking pity on us!) to deal with it. All the while he protests that Adobe doesn't need to do anything to improve it to deal with the challenges of HTML 5, because only "minority" browser vendors care about that, and IE will always be king. He'd better hope so.

startingup 17y ago

What this acquisition demonstrates is that there is a lot of established vendors who have cash burning a hole in their pocket, but no organic sources of growth. Years of bureaucratic culture - I would have said marketing culture but Apple does marketing well, so it would be a disservice to real marketeers to call Adobe's a marketing culture - has destroyed the technology soul of the company. Result: clueless management goes and overpays, aided and abetted by investment bankers (public) or VCs (private). This disease abounds in the industry. Sun overpaid for a series of companies over a 7 year period; Intuit has acquired and done nothing with a whole lot of them; the less said about Yahoo the better; and VMWare + SpringSource ($400 million?) ... I guess there is hope for a lot of start-ups yet ;-)

netsp 17y ago
Adobe has a reasonable good record with acquisitions.
- paraschopra 17y ago
  Yup, the acquisition of Macromedia comes to my mind. They have leveraged that pretty well.

dtap 17y ago

It is good to see the M&A activity picking up. Zappos, Mint, now Omniture. The fact that companies can get enough cash to make acquisitions is a good sign the worst is behind us.

chaosmachine 17y ago

Hm, $1.8 billion. That's roughly 2.5 million copies of Photoshop CS4.

Tichy 17y ago
That's not even that much... (2.5 million I mean).

SwellJoe 17y ago

This strikes me as a poor fit, way too expensive, and betting on the future of the Internet playing out in ways that are bad for open standards and thus bad for consumers. Betting on bad outcomes for consumers is a dangerous business. Every major player except Adobe wants to see changes to how video and rich content are delivered on the web, and some of those changes (the standards-based ones like HTML video) tend to align with what consumers want (more widespread availability of video and rich content on their phones, netbooks, other operating systems, etc.)...and this acquisition is betting that Flash and Adobe content delivery mechanisms will become more important to the web ecosystem in the future. $1.8 billion is an awful lot to spend on something that seems very likely to decline in importance going forward. Of course, I could be misunderstanding Omniture's value and how diverse their products are. Their website is a bit vague and confusing. Then again, I don't have an MBA, so I might just be missing something.

netsp 17y ago
betting on the future of the Internet playing out in ways that are bad for open standards I understand why you think adobe is betting against open standards and against consumers, but why do you think that this move is doing that? BTW, I am definitely not an expert on this matter, but it seems to me that people can get pretty dogmatic about standards. Adobe managed to get more options in to most people's browsers in a way that works. Even standards might benefit from a little competition. way too expensive Can you elaborate? Stock is at a relative low. Omniture's revenue is about 1/6 of sale price (they are not profitable, but they are growing). This strikes me as a poor fit I don't know a huge amount about this company, but judging by their income statement, they seem like a services company at least as much as a product development one. - 31-Dec-08 31-Dec-07 31-Dec-06 Revenue 295,613 143,127 79,749 Cost of Revenue 125,940 53,364 31,826 Research Development 36,966 17,257 8,732 Selling General & Admin175,851 85,828 47,334 The interesting thing is that Adobe has bought a company that looks like it is primarily a consulting/customisation/sales company.
- SwellJoe 17y ago

foulmouthboy 17y ago

To me, this is Adobe's play at being everything that it takes to build websites. Start with the tools and popular platforms and move right into the measurement and optimization.

zaidf 17y ago

I don't know too much about Omniture. But I recently met the chief of online marketing of Lenovo and after much prodding about how big companies manage their marketing, he told me they all use Omniture.

paraschopra 17y ago

I think Adobe has bought Omniture's sales fleet, not its technology. Omniture sales team has significant reach across all big publishers on the web. Almost every big player knows or has used Omniture's testing, targeting or analytics solutions. Adobe may well utilize that reach to cross-sell its proprietary technology.