What is Adobe Experience Manager?

Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) is a content management system, or CMS, designed for large business applications. Some people in the industry have started referring to AEM and other similar platforms as a Digital Experience Platform (DXP) rather than a CMS. With AEM you can build sites, mobile apps, forms, run eCommerce, and more. AEM is a tool to manage every aspect of your customer’s online interactions with your business. With the Adobe Experience Cloud, AEM integrates with platforms like Adobe Analytics, and Adobe Commerce. You can see a full list of Experience Cloud Products here.

AEM is primarily targeted at large enterprise businesses because of software costs and the costs of running an AEM solution. However, Adobe is shifting to mid-market companies with their move to Cloud-based out-of-the-box solutions.

Businesses choose to use AEM because it is second to none in its ability to keep a streamlined, consistent message across a wide variety of web pages, devices, workflows, and languages.

Here are some different tools and features of AEM:

AI-Powered Analytics deliver customer profiles and customer data across a customer’s purchasing journey to give them custom, and fast experiences across any platform. Tools used for this are Adobe Experience Platform, Customer Journey Analytics, Adobe Analytics, Adobe Audience Manager, and the Real-time Customer Data Platform.

AEM can help you target, test, orchestrate, engage, and plan your campaigns when your business uses Marketo Engage, Adobe Campaign, Adobe Target, and Journey Optimizer.

Adobe Commerce enables a high-end eCommerce experience that scales from mid-market to enterprise businesses.

AEM will help your business manage, deliver, and optimize content delivery to your customers.

History

Adobe Experience Manager was originally a Day Software Product called Day Communique or (Day CQ). Day Software was acquired by Adobe Systems in 2010. The name was then changed to Adobe CQ.

With Adobe CQ, Adobe’s goal was to lead the market with the best Web Content Management, Digital Asset Management, and Social Collaboration offerings by merging Adobe and Day Software’s technology.

The Adobe CQ Product was then rebranded as Adobe Experience Manager in 2013. If you would like to learn more about the history of AEM check out this blog.

How Many Businesses Use AEM?

By looking at public data from Adobe we were able to predict that there are between 5,000 and 4,000 different organizations using AEM.

How much does AEM Cost?

By using our predicted number of users and revenue numbers from the annual 10-k from 2021, we can calculate the average cost of AEM licensing. Digital Experience revenue for Adobe was listed at $3.87 billion in 2021. Using our estimation of 5 thousand and 4 thousand AEM users, and our team’s experience your business can expect average licensing costs of between $774,000 and $967,500.

There are more costs associated with AEM than licensing costs. Your business will need developers, content creators, engineers, and more to properly operate AEM.

The cost of AEM varies on the size and needs of your organization. Adobe is trying to make AEM cheaper to manage and license with its Cloud Service for Adobe Experience Manager offerings as it moves to the mid-market.

Conclusion

You have been interacting with Adobe’s AEM without realizing it. Many of the largest consumer-facing retailers, banks, schools, and government sites use AEM to conduct business. This blog is not a complete explanation of AEM. In the future we will tackle how AEM works, the process of purchasing AEM, how to get a job in AEM, and much more. Please reach out to us through the contact form or business phone number for any AEM questions you may have!

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