Creative license for success

Adobe expects to transition the bulk of perpetual licenses to its subscription model over the next couple of years.

The company’s ANZ channel chief, Steve Martin, talks to Heather Wright about the new Creative Cloud for Teams offering.

When Adobe unveiled its Creative Cloud for Teams subscription offering in late January, the company included an added sweetener for the reseller channel with a 20% deal registration offer over and above the standard margins available.

But Steve Martin, Adobe’s head of channel for Australia and New Zealand, says the Creative Cloud offering is an easy sell to resellers, even without the deal registration offer.

Creative Cloud for Teams is the small and medium sized business version of the Creative Cloud offering launched mid-2012.

Both offer access to the full range of Creative Suite 6 products, as well as Adobe Muse, Acrobat XI, Lightroom 4, Edge tools and services.

The Teams offering bolsters the 20GB of cloud storage available for the individual service to 100GB per user.

In addition it offers administrative tools for centralised license purchase and management.

“There’s been a lot of partner excitement already. This changes the business model in the way the partners interact with customers,” Martin says.

Sticky business

“Adobe’s Creative Cloud offering for teams represents a fundamental change for resellers with a new VIP (value incentive plan) option now available.

“The new Adobe VIP will allow resellers to develop a stronger relationship with their customers by offering Creative Cloud for Teams with no minimum license requirement, easy management, immediate deployment and automatic compliance.”

Martin says the model also creates a much tighter relationship between the customer and reseller by tightly linking customers to a partner.

Under the new model, open to Platinum, Gold and certified partners, partners are responsible for inviting customers to participate in Creative Cloud, using the VIP portal.

Once the customer has accepted the invitation, the reseller becomes the partner of record for that customer and any time the customer orders additional licenses, it defaults to the original partner.

“It’s quite cumbersome for the customer to go and change partners down the track,” Martin adds.

Customers, for their part, can add new licenses and gain immediate access to the software, with the reseller receiving a notification of the new license/s.

The partner then invoices the customer. If payment isn’t received within 30 days, the software is automatically deactivated.

“And that’s another benefit for partners,” Martin says. “This helps partners to automate compliance.”

However, the model could have a sting in its tail for retailers who don’t act quickly. Notes Martin: “If you don’t invite your customer, sooner or later another reseller will.

“I strongly recommend resellers understand Creative Cloud, take the time to be enabled in it and start inviting customers.”

On the move

Martin says the individual offering of Creative Cloud has been ‘a tremendous success’ with more than one million subscribers joining in the six to seven months since it launched. No New Zealand figures were available.

“All of the software available in Creative Cloud is worth about AU$5000. But with Creative Cloud you can get that for AU$87/month (with an annual commitment).

"That’s an incredible saving and we believe that significant reduction in entry price will bring large numbers of new customers into the Creative world.”

Martin says 40% of customers signing up to Creative Cloud for individuals were new customers.

The company expects ‘pretty much all’ of its current perpetual license holders to move to Creative Cloud over the next couple of years, with Martin saying the offering has ‘a very, very strong value proposition’ for that market.

“It’s very powerful for customers on perpetual licenses, but it also opens up new markets and a wealth of new opportunities, removing that barrier to entry by reducing the costs,” Martin says.

Meanwhile, Martin says the deal registration programme will see resellers receiving 20% rebate for every opportunity of five seats registered.

The Channel