Adobe is one of the largest software companies worldwide (top 5 based on market cap and top 5 based on revenues). They successfully transitioned from a licensed revenue model to a subscription revenue model during the last decade, giving them additional business visibility and predictability. Similar to other enterprise software companies, Adobe created partner programs to accelerate enterprise adoption for their solutions.
Adobe offers creative, marketing and commerce solutions, primarily with their Creative Cloud and their Adobe Experience Cloud. Products offered include Photoshop, Illustrator and other popular design tools, pls analytics, email marketing, commerce, CMS and digital asset management products, totaling an estimated $18 billion in revenue for fiscal year 2023.
Digital experience companies and marketing agencies create digital journeys for their customers and utilize an array of solutions from the market to create the best digital presence. Some of these services companies and agencies partner with Adobe to implement and maintain their customer’s infrastructure. We decided to take a look at the Adobe services partner ecosystem to understand its reach. Below some highlights.
Adobe lists approximately 840 services partners worldwide. We cleaned up the data and excluded some duplicate partners that were acquired and were listed twice, plus other names where we could not find any public info. We ended up with 806 services partners.
The headquarters country defines the region where we listed the partner. These partners employ approximately 4.8 million team members overall and have 11,585 certified employees (0.2% of total) in Adobe products, carrying 16,281 certifications (average of 1.4 certifications per certified employee overall).
77% of partners are based in North America and Europe, matching Adobe’s revenue geographies (59% of Adobe’s revenue comes from the Americas and 26% from EMEA).
Boutique partners and agencies with less than 1,000 employees account for 84% of worldwide partners, and just 2% of headcount. 456 partners have less than 100 employees (57% of total) and employ 15,367 people (average of 34 employees per company). There is an important fragmentation in the smaller Adobe partner tiers.
At Alten Capital we invest in business services and technology services companies. Supporting successful ISVs is a proven strategy to scale services organizations. We enjoy connecting with services companies in strong ISV ecosystems.