Before I walk into Summit for the first time, I wanted to know which Adobe I am actually showing up to see. My own Adobe goes back to Omniture, ColdFusion, and Dreamweaver. That dates me, and it also gives me a useful vantage point.
My Adobe was Omniture before it was Adobe. When I was a product manager at Network Solutions, I owned the small business analytics tools that Omniture sold us, and I tried to build them into a real product line for our customer base. I did not get the resources. That was my mistake to own, and it is also the reason I think about Adobe differently than most people writing about it now. The enterprise analytics category that became Adobe Experience Platform had a small business on-ramp once. It did not survive the acquisition.
Before Omniture it was ColdFusion and Dreamweaver, which came to Adobe through the Macromedia deal in 2005. Every web developer of a certain vintage has an opinion about those products and what happened to them inside Adobe. Some are charitable. Some are not.
So when I say everyone has a different Adobe in their head, I mean it literally. Ask five people what Adobe is and you will get five answers. The photographer will say Lightroom. The designer will say Photoshop and Illustrator. The finance team will say Acrobat. The CMO will say Experience Platform and GenStudio. The CEO reading a quarterly earnings report will say AI company. All of them are right. None of them are seeing the whole thing.
Summit is this week. I wanted to know which Adobe I am actually walking in to see before the keynote tells me.
So I spent a few hours with the fiscal 2025 financials. Figures throughout are vendor-supplied and unaudited.
The Breadth Is Not an Accident. It Is the Strategy.
Most software companies try to own one category. They build the best tool for a specific job and defend that position. Adobe does something different. It accumulates workflow surfaces. Creative production. Document productivity. Marketing platform. Enterprise data. Now search intelligence, through the pending Semrush acquisition.
From the outside, that can look like sprawl. From inside the business, it is the thing that makes the rest work.
Fiscal 2025 revenue came in at $23.77 billion, up 11% year over year. Operating cash flow was $10.03 billion. That cash flow pays for research, acquisitions, and product bets that would be existential at a smaller company. When Adobe decides to fund a multi-year NVIDIA compute partnership, or build its own Firefly foundation models, or write a $1.9 billion check for Semrush, it does not have to bet the business to do any of it.
That is the compounding advantage. It is also why people who think Adobe is just a creative tools company keep getting surprised by what it ships.
The Product Nobody Talks About Is Growing Fastest
Digital Media is the biggest part of Adobe, the segment with Creative Cloud and Acrobat inside it. That segment did $17.65 billion in fiscal 2025, up 11% year over year.
Inside that segment, Document Cloud grew 18% in the most recent period with sub-segment disclosure. Creative Cloud grew 10%. Acrobat, the product most people forget is a product, is growing faster than the flagship. Nearly half of fourth-quarter enterprise renewals upgraded to Acrobat Studio.
I doubt Summit will lead with that.
The keynote energy is going to be on Firefly, on agentic campaigns, on generative video. Marketers did not fly to Las Vegas to talk about document productivity. But the NVIDIA partnership announced at GTC in March includes Nemotron capabilities coming to Acrobat, which means Adobe is putting the same compute investment underneath documents as it is underneath creative. Most enterprise workflows touch a PDF somewhere in the chain, and Adobe knows exactly where.
The Enterprise Story Is a Customer Count, Not a User Count
Every tech company in 2026 brags about monthly active users. Adobe has plenty. Seventy million freemium creative users. More than 750 million across Acrobat and Express. Firefly subscriptions doubled quarter over quarter.
The number I keep coming back to is smaller and more telling.
More than 150 Adobe customers now spend at least $10 million a year, and that count grew 25% year over year. These are not users. They are organizations that have embedded Adobe's workflows deeply enough that the eight-figure annual commitment is an operational line, not a procurement debate.
That is the group Summit is really organized around. The Diamond-level sponsors, the Accentures and Deloittes and Publicis Sapients, are not flying executives to Las Vegas to sell Adobe Express licenses. They are there because implementing Experience Platform at a Fortune 500 is a multi-year services engagement worth defending at seven-figure sponsorship cost. That is also what I wrote about in the sponsor list post last week.
The Segment That Looks Slow Is Not Slow
Digital Experience, the marketing platform business, grew 9% year over year. That is what most of the earnings coverage cited, and it makes the segment look like a steady enterprise software business.
Inside that 9%, Experience Platform and its native applications grew more than 30%. GenStudio grew more than 25%. The segment average is dragged toward the middle by slower-growing older deployments. The new stuff is moving at the pace that justifies the Summit session list.
This is what I mean by different Adobes in different heads. A longtime Adobe Experience Manager customer sees a steady vendor. An AEP customer with GenStudio sees a fast-moving platform. Same company. Different product, different era, different experience. The headline segment number averages them together and misses what is actually happening underneath.
Semrush Is the Piece I Want to Ask About in Las Vegas
In December, Adobe announced it was acquiring Semrush for about $1.9 billion. Regulatory approval pending, expected to close this year.
The stated thesis is clean. Content does not stop mattering when it ships. It has to perform in search environments, and increasingly in generative search environments. Semrush brings the demand-side intelligence. Connected to GenStudio, that becomes a feedback loop that informs what gets produced next.
That argument is credible on paper.
What is less clear is the customer base fit. Semrush has about 117,000 paying customers, heavily small and mid-size businesses. Adobe's enterprise motion is built around a small number of big partnerships and direct accounts managing multi-million dollar relationships. Different buyers, different buying patterns, different support expectations.
This is the part where my Omniture memory kicks in. When Adobe acquired Omniture, the small business analytics on-ramp I was working with quietly stopped being a priority. The enterprise customers were more valuable per account, the sales motion was better understood, and the small business work got deprioritized. It is the reasonable commercial decision. It is also how acquired customer bases end up feeling orphaned two or three years after the deal closes.
Adobe has the cash to do Semrush differently. Whether it has the management attention to do it well, while also integrating NVIDIA compute, shipping agentic capabilities, and training new Firefly models, is the question I want to hear answered at Summit. Big companies with strong cash flow can absorb a lot of simultaneous investment. They can also absorb the cost of doing several of them badly.
What I Am Bringing to Las Vegas
The Adobe most people know first is the creative tools Adobe, because that is the version most visible. The Adobe the fiscal 2025 financials describe is a company that has been quietly running a multi-decade strategy of accumulating workflow surfaces, using the cash from the mature surfaces to fund the research that produces the next ones. ColdFusion, Dreamweaver, Omniture, Marketo, Magento, Figma's attempted acquisition, now Semrush. Each acquisition changed what Adobe could sell and who it could sell to.
You can argue about whether the strategy works for every customer. The ones who were on the receiving end of deprioritized product lines will have one view. The ones whose workflows are deeply embedded in the current platform will have another. What is harder to argue is that the strategy has not worked at the company level. The segment numbers, the customer cohort growth, the research partnerships, and the willingness to write $1.9 billion checks for category expansion all add up to a company that is not defending a position. It is still placing bets.
I am walking into Summit with three questions. How deployed is the agentic layer outside of co-innovation accounts? What does the Semrush integration actually look like on the go-to-market side, especially for the small business customer base? And is Document Cloud getting the attention from Adobe's own marketing team that the revenue growth suggests it deserves?
I will report back.
Adobe's new reporting structure means your next renewal is going to arrive as one bundle, not five separate conversations. Creative Cloud, Experience Platform, GenStudio, Firefly Foundry, and eventually Semrush, all in one line. The question is not whether Adobe has the breadth to offer that bundle. It does. The question is whether the people evaluating the renewal in your organization are still reading Adobe as the product they bought ten years ago, or as the platform company it has become.
