Enterprise Technology Platforms

Adobe and Google are usually compared on capability, which is the part of the decision that ages fastest. What separates them in practice sits around the software: how the vendor charges, how many firms can credibly implement it, what their badges are worth, and how much of your own organisation the choice quietly redesigns.

This page works at that level — the commercial shape of each vendor, how partner supply differs, what certifications evidence, what moving between the ecosystems involves, and what standardising on one, or running both, does to governance and team design.

How each vendor charges, and why that reaches your partner bill

Adobe sells entitlements under negotiated enterprise agreements, usually multi-year and per application, sized in advance and largely fixed once signed. On the build-heavy applications the licence runs for months before the capability exists, so first-year services routinely outweigh first-year licence. Google charges two ways inside one ecosystem: media platforms price against spend, often reached through a reseller, while Google Cloud is consumption-billed and the bill moves daily with what the team does.

• Different pricing funds different services markets. A fixed, front-loaded commitment pays for project-shaped work and a bench behind it. Spend- and consumption-linked pricing pays for desks on retainers, and in the media half for partners whose margin rides on your spend rather than your fees.
• Ask who sized the entitlements. The partner helping you size an Adobe commitment usually has an interest in the services scope attached to it, so get those assumptions written down while they can still be challenged.
• Where a meter runs, design is a recurring cost. A modelling shortcut reappears on every monthly bill, which justifies paying senior rates once. Under a committed licence a poor design costs labour but no more licence, so the debt survives longer.

Partner supply is shaped differently on each side

Adobe runs a tiered solution partner programme with certification and commercial thresholds at every level, and thresholds constrain population: the firms holding senior depth in a given Experience Cloud product, in a given market, are few enough to enumerate. The Google side is close to the opposite. Certification is cheap and self-service and the marketing-side company designations are deliberately flatter, so the population runs very large and uneven, from global media networks down to two-person tagging shops.

• On Adobe the scarce thing is availability, not discovery. You can list the credible firms for a product; you cannot assume the architect you met is free. Ask for named people, their allocation and a real start date — certified headcount says nothing about who is assigned to you.
• On Google the scarce thing is discrimination, not discovery. A search returns more plausible firms than anyone can evaluate, many of them real but shallow in the layer you need. Narrow the requirement first, then filter on documented work in that layer.

What a certification actually evidences

The two vendors certify quite different things under the same word, and the difference decides how far a badge should move a shortlist.

• Adobe certifies individuals, per product, in levels. The exams test the product and the credential belongs to the person, so a firm's tier aggregates how many such people it employs — which describes its hiring rather than your project team.
• Adobe's specialisations are the stronger half of the same programme. Awarded to the firm against a product area and resting on engagements the vendor verifies with the customer, they sit far closer to delivery evidence than an exam result.
• Google's individual certifications signal familiarity, not scarcity. Free or cheap, self-service and renewed by re-sitting, a wall of them evidences an afternoon invested per person rather than products operated under pressure.
• Google's assessed specialisations are the exception. On the Cloud side they require certified staff plus customer outcomes the vendor reviews, which puts them in the same class as an Adobe specialisation and above any individual certificate.

Migration between the two is mostly a commercial problem

Neither certification scheme tests the work that actually breaks programmes, and migration is the clearest case. Wholesale replacement of one ecosystem by the other is rarer than either vendor implies and never really one project, since content, measurement and activation move on different timelines with different owners. What happens instead is displacement at a single layer, and that fails predictably.

• History does not move. The hard part is not tagging, it is that years of reporting live inside definitions that will not survive the trip. Decide up front whether history is warehoused, frozen or abandoned, and get whoever defends the year-on-year comparison to agree in writing.
• The exit is governed by the contract, not by your plan. A committed agreement ends when its term ends, so finishing a migration and still paying for what you left is an ordinary outcome. That arithmetic belongs at the front of the business case.
• The rarest capability is fluency in the platform you are leaving. Someone has to find what the outgoing system has been doing that nobody documented, and those are the people with the least commercial reason to stay current on it.

Standardising on one ecosystem versus running both

This gets argued as an architecture question and settled by what the organisation can staff and govern. Standardising buys coherence — fewer integration surfaces, one identity model, a hiring market where the advertised role is legible — and concentrates risk, because you reach renewal with no credible alternative anywhere in the building. Running both buys leverage and charges for it in coordination, since the failure modes move into the gaps between systems.

• A dual estate needs a named owner for the seam. Identity, consent state and metric definitions sit between the ecosystems, so the job has no home on a functional org chart. Unnamed, it lands on whoever has capacity and then evaporates.
• Decision rights matter more than architecture. When two systems answer the same question differently, someone needs authority to declare which answer stands and to reject changes that break the other side. Unwritten, that argument reruns quarterly and is settled by seniority.
• Vendor management needs two different muscles. A committed agreement is an event prepared months ahead; consumption billing is a weekly discipline that never ends. Most organisations are practised at one, and the missing one is where money leaks.
• Hiring changes shape too. A standardised estate hires specialists into legible roles. A dual estate needs people fluent across both, who are scarcer and routinely recruited away into one specialism, so plan for turnover in the roles holding the seams together.