Earlier this week Adobe announced it was taking its relationship with Livefyre, the cloud-based content marketing and engagement platform, to the next level by acquiring the firm for an undisclosed amount. The acquisition, expected to officially close in the coming months, will enable Adobe Marketing Cloud customers to increase their content velocity by integrating real-time, user-generated content into their content marketing mix.

Smart buy by Adobe

Livefyre’s ability to capture, organize, and publish user-generated content nicely rounds out existing social capabilities (management and governance, listening and moderation, social publishing, and social analytics) found in Adobe Social.

User generated content has a huge influence on brand-related decisions, so adding Livefyre to the Adobe Marketing Cloud suite of solutions makes sense, and will help further solidify Adobe’s position as a front-runner in the digital experience technology platform race. For existing Adobe customers, who aren’t Livefyre customer, this acquisition fills a gap in Adobe’s ability to offer a more complete digital experience solution, and gives them an edge over some of their competition who still rely on partners to deliver similar capabilities. For prospects considering AEM or other Adobe Marketing Cloud solutions, this may be enough to push them over the edge to make the leap.

The upside for existing Livefyre/non-Adobe customers isn’t as clear. No doubt Adobe will actively market attractive offers to existing Livefyre customers, but the acquisition in itself won’t be enough to move them from their current content management solution and marketing/experience platforms to AEM. Some good news for this group is that similar to its Adobe Marketing Cloud suite partners, Livefyre will remain a stand alone product, so current customers, regardless of their relationship with Adobe, will continue to have full access to its current, and future, capabilities.

What does this mean for other Livefyre partners?

Salesforce, whose “strategic partnership” with Livefyre was announced just two days following their Adobe partnership announcement last September, may be feeling the sting more than other partners. Salesforce Ventures, a strategic venture fund focused 100% on creating the world’s largest ecosystem of enterprise cloud companies, was part of Livefyre’s February 2015 $47M series D round of funding. With that, along with a brand change planned to align the newly acquired solution with the rest of the suite, I suspect Salesforce, as well as other partners like Open Text and Acquia, likely don’t want their brands tied to Adobe’s wagon, and are already looking for other content marketing and engagement platform solutions to hitch their horses to.

Marriage announcement, May 10, 2016: Adobe completed the close of the Livefyre acquisition.