Adobe Summit 2013 - Day 1 Highlights

Today marked day one of the Digital Marketing Conference known as Adobe Summit. It kicked off with the usual fanfare and a crowd of over 5,000 people in attendance from over 27 different countries. Again this year, Brad Rencher started things off with his keynote address entitled “The Last Millisecond”.

In a nutshell, his keynote highlighted the need that all marketers have to capture and react within milliseconds in order to create individual experiences that compel consumers to act and engage with your brand.

Brad was joined on stage by Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen, who reinforced Adobe's commitment to changing the way we, as digital marketers, work with their new Adobe Marketing Cloud (read more about these announcements here).

Rather than reiterate what was said, I'd suggest you watch the live stream here: http://summit.adobe.com/stream.html

Following Mr. Narayen's address to the crowd, we were greeted with a taste of how the new Adobe Marketing Cloud makes it easier for all functional areas; from marketing to data analysts; to communicate quickly and efficiently without the need for huge delays and red tape.

For those who missed our tweets during the keynotes, here's a breakdown of the key items we, and some others, shared:[View the story “Adobe Summit Keynote Highlights” on Storify]

Following the keynotes, we had an opportunity to ask questions of the Adobe Executives at a Press Q&A event. Most of the questions seemed to come from analysts but we asked a few which we thought were relevant. The first of which is when can we expect to see the full suite of Adobe Marketing Cloud products generally available?

According to Brad Rencher, they are aiming to have them ready for public consumption by mid-summer and are beta testing as we speak with a number of partners and customers. Let's hope that deadline stands true and we can get our hands on this product sooner rather than later.

How long will the typical implementation last? Is it going to be faster than previous iterations of these products? Yes, says Mr. Narayen. The more we get these five solutions integrated with one another, the smoother the implementation will be and it certainly doesn't hurt that these services are all SaaS based now, which eliminates the need for deploying on customer hardware / environments.

What's next on the docket for CMS Critic today? We have the press reception to attend following by the famed Summit Bash we wrote about last year. This year, we get a live concert from Grammy award-winning rockers, The Black Keys. Life is rough in SLC.. but trudge on we must…

Want to learn more about Adobe's products? Visit them online at http://www.adobe.com