Adobe Experience Platform Web SDK and Edge Network overview

If you’re one of those people who has to get data to Adobe Solutions, or even non Adobe solution, you’re aware of the last four big trends happening.

First, the trend around performance. Everyone’s getting hammered to have the higher performing apps in higher performing sites, milliseconds matter. The next is privacy. The same teams that are in charge of getting data where they’re supposed to be in dealing with performance are also being told to deal with privacy and changing laws, and make sure that the company doesn’t get sued. And then there’s changing technology, the browsers are changing and deleting third party cookies. And of course, the simplicity of data is getting harder to manage. There’s more and more solutions that require data. So this is why we’ve created the new Adobe Experience Platform Web SDK and Adobe Experience Platform Edge Network. It’s the biggest change in data collection and personalization, since the first eVar, which was back in 1998.

So it’s about time for us to shift things a little bit when it came to data collection. Now our objective was simple and simple as in quotation marks because it’s supposed to sound simple, but I can guarantee it wasn’t. The first is we wanted to create one Adobe JavaScript library to replace all of the current ones. And yes, you heard that correctly, to replace at measurement at.js, the visitor ID, all of our JavaScript libraries, replace them with one JavaScript library, not just push them together and squish them together, but really rewrite it from scratch, have one Adobe beacon, have one data stream, have one server side destination, one place that you’re sending your data, not lots of different domains and lots of different endpoints, but one that’s first party manage for all of your Adobe application and Adobe Experience platform and third party use cases to give you total control of your data from the first millisecond to the last.

This is a radical change. And let me express it a little differently. If you’re again or that person who has to get data into Adobe Solutions, you’re used to managing four or five JavaScript libraries. In this representation, what we’re saying is that the sources or channels of data, would be a web SDK, a Mobile SDK or server side API, but that the data that you’re streaming to Adobe should be use case for solution agnostic. That means you should never be tagging a website for an eVar or Embox, or any other felician proprietary schema. Just sending name value pairs, we call this XDM. XDM is our format for name value pairs, but sending name value pairs to one edge network. It’s the one of the largest globally distributed, edge networks in the world. We’ve been doing this since before it was an industry. We handle Disney plus and the apple keynotes and the Super Bowl and World Cup and everything else, one of the largest networks on the planet for collecting data. We’ve never told you about it because we’ve never given you access to do anything on it before.

But today we’re changing that, you’re sending one stream of data to this first party domain managed single endpoint. So it’s sending data to you. And we’re just enabling it. And then we are using this globally distributed edge network to remap and adjust the data to the format’s required for Adobe Solutions and sending it to those solutions in real time. And so this network data goes from in the case of websites, you can follow that top line, it goes from websites and in a solution agnostic format, name value pairs, directly to the platform, Audience Manager, Target or bi directional, meaning the payloads for personalization are coming back through there and analytics if you’re using what we would suggest for name value pairs, you can use whatever you want, an XDM, but if you use what we suggest we can map those things on the fly to common Adobe Analytics variables and then allow you to use processing rules to change anything else you need to deliver.

So instead of spending a ton of time, wrangling code on the site, you’re actually sending easy to understand streams of data to one endpoint, and then mapping it server side to the different destinations and formats that it requires. So if you’ve got, you know, 500, or 5000 sites that need eVar seven turned to eVar 14, you do it in one place at the edge instead of going in to launch and doing it each individually. Now, this new JavaScript library, this SDK, as well as our Mobile SDK, and forthcoming server to server API’s all managed with a launch and make it really easy for you to manage all of this. And what this means is faster performance. Our new web JavaScript library is 80% smaller than using our traditional JavaScript libraries and 70% faster. In fact, you’re not going back and forth with user IDs, you’re able to just quickly add the IDs either on the browser or being forwarded from the edge. It’s privacy is baked in to the first millisecond, we don’t do anything until you tell us to do it across all of the technologies that use this new web SDK. So many technologies are trying to cram consent in from some other direction. And we have a baked in from the beginning.

It’s all first party domain managed. And so if third party cookies are being deleted, it’s not going to affect your first party ID with Adobe. And we’ve simplified everything, you’re sending a simple, easy to understand data stream and then formatting it from the edge. There’s more. So if you’ll notice when I talked about these things about our simple plan one, there’ll be JavaScript library, one Adobe container type, one data stream to one-server side destinations, first party domain, and then all Adobe applications, the Adobe Experience platform and third party use cases. Now I kind of just talked about that really quickly. But we just showed you how we can go and have these streams of data, go to one network and then go to these other Adobe Solutions. And that solves Adobe’s data collection. But your data collection as a customer is much bigger than that. Because you could have dozens if not hundreds of endpoints, that you’re trying to send data to as quickly as possible. Maybe it’s another application for analytics. Maybe it’s your own data lake, maybe it’s some sort of messaging service to tell people what’s going on. And so instead of just solving it for us, we took the same framework of launch and actually put it on top of this edge network. And our goal is to solve all of your other endpoints, all of your data collection, think of this as data collection as a service, be able to send it to any endpoint, all through launch. And because it’s built through launch, launch server side, will also have the ability for you to build your own extensions and for our partners to build extensions.

It’s an open and extensible framework or an ecosystem or platform for sending data wherever it needs to go. And that’s a huge important message, is that when it comes to the flexibility of sending data where you need to, we’re not a Blackbox, we’re opening up this revolutionary technology so that you and us and our partners can all build on top of our new edge network. We are announcing at Adobe, a single web SDK, a JavaScript library that does all of the work more effectively than the current analytics, Audience Manager, Target, and ECID libraries. It sends data in name value pairs, which we call XDM, but XDM is just a format for name value pairs. Think of it as our wrapper around JSON. We’re sending name value pairs to one endpoint, which is first party managed, the Adobe Experience Platform Edge Network. It is one of the largest edge network data collection networks on the planet, san to compliant, real time optimized and at the edge, you’ll be able to format data directly to the platform to Adobe Analytics to Audience Manager and to Target with better and easier to use consent, better performance, first party domain ID across all of our solutions, as well as a steady, easy to understand, semantically sound data stream that’s agnostic to any of these solutions. You’re turning things on server side. And we now are announcing launch with server side features for taking that same stream of name value pair data and remapping it to any other endpoint. It’s an open and extensible framework for others to build extensions as well. So thank you so much for this. If, again, you’re one of these guys or girls are like I forgot to get data into these systems. What we just said, is a big deal. We think it’s the next big step for enterprise data collection.

There’s a lot of other companies that are trying to solve one or two or maybe three parts of your real data collection needs. We’re here to solve all of it, from the first millisecond, every millisecond after that, a company that’s been around here doing this for decades, and we’ll be here in the future and make sure that we’re committed to your success. Thank you. -