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How Adobe achieves real-time customer personalization at scale

The Adobe Experience Platform handles up to 30 trillion queries per day. Discover how Adobe effectively addressed the complexities of managing customer experiences at an extreme scale.

Alex Patino
Alexander Patino
Content Marketing Manager
December 26, 2023|3 min read

At Aerospike Summit 2023, Adobe’s VP of Engineering, Sandeep Nawathe, presented the technical approach to segmentation and personalization for its Adobe Experience Platform (AEP). Adobe has many products – Photoshop and Illustrator are essentially household names. However, the company also has a full suite of offerings designed to help businesses understand and engage with their customers at a deeper level. It integrates various data sources, providing real-time customer profiles and advanced analytics, enabling personalized and cohesive customer experiences across channels.

The objective: Power a real-time customer data platform at trillion-query scale

AEP, in Adobe’s words, “enables organizations to centralize and standardize customer data from any system. It then applies data science and machine learning to dramatically improve the design and delivery of rich, personalized experiences.” AEP has been riding a high-momentum wave. Nawathe explains in his presentation that nearly 12,000 brands use AEP, with over 450 partner integrations, 31 billion customer profiles, and 30 trillion queries running daily. One of the central applications in AEP is Adobe’s Real-Time CDP (short for customer data platform). Nawathe details Adobe’s journey to make their CDP perform in real time (making it an RTCDP), particularly through revamping their query processing approach.Adobe Real-Time CDP handles data from over 12,000 customers. This platform performs identity resolutions and generates audiences for various destinations. These destinations are where audiences are typically dispatched to, such as the email service provider, customer support, or the help desk. Within that ecosystem, there are potentially countless organizations that have their own CDP offering for customer interactions. Imagine just one of those customers being a globally known banking institution like Wells Fargo. In that case, Adobe would serve that entire ecosystem plus 11,999 of its own customers. His efficient solution for the extreme scale and complexity was tackling the issue with Aerospike as a managed service on Azure.

The solution: Streaming segmentation with Aerospike

Segmentation queries involve complex criteria, combining profile and behavioral data with time-sensitive conditions. So, what are the challenges of real-time personalization at scale?

How can it be done more efficiently to handle the extreme scale the Adobe Real-Time CDP requires? Watch the full session above to understand how they made a profile store with Aerospike and took an innovative approach to storing incremental state.

Enrich streaming data with Aerospike

Our guest speaker, Sandeep Nawathe, goes into much further detail in his Summit 2023 session. We encourage you to watch it in its entirety to get a more granular, nuanced understanding of how Aerospike fits into Adobe’s stack.

Are you looking for your own AdTech or Customer 360 solution? Read our solution brief on increasing personalization and accuracy at scale and our Forrester study on improving conversion rates and the overall customer experience.