Buying with Adobe's Purchasing Programs

It's time you and me talk about the elephant in the room. Adobe Licensing in this video we will explore how Adobe licenses its products, its purchasing programs, and how it segments its customers to serve up different pricing for each business situation. Follow me and let's jump into it. Adobe is a software giant with titles used by almost all enterprises, small to medium sized businesses and individuals across the globe. Its software repertoire spans all industry angles with fan favorite classics such as Photoshop and Illustrator to even PDF, e commerce and analytics software like Adobe Analytics, Marketo and Adobe Acrobat. With so many programs, clouds and products, it's hard to determine the right licensing for your business and how to keep track of it all so that you're not over buying or over licensing in your organization. Before getting your product's licensing terms, conditions and pricing, Adobe likes to determine what kind of segment you're in as of 2022, your Adobe products and pricing that you've access to is dependent on whether you're in one of five segments. A you're a government entity, an educational entity, a commercial entity, an individual buyer, or a student or teacher. We'll mainly be focusing on the first three commercial, government and educational buyers. So after you've determined your segment or Adobe's determined for you, there are four main ways to license each of your programs that Adobe offers. Each with varying terms, discounts and products you can buy within them. These are also called Adobe's purchasing programs. The four purchasing programs are the Value Incentive Plan, the Enterprise Term Licensing Agreement, the Cumulative Licensing Plan and the Transactional Licensing Plan, the tlp. Let's take a look at what's inside the Value Incentive Plan. This plan is available for the first three segments that we discussed. Educational buyers, government buyers, and also commercial buyers. The Value Incentive Plan includes subscription licensing with term lengths of one to three years, loyalty options, volume discounts, access to Adobe's licensing manager named User Licensing for all three segments, device Based licensing for educational buyers only, and Shared Device Licensing for educational buyers only as well. Next in line is the Enterprise Term Licensing Agreement etla. As they say, this is a three year term customized agreement for commercial and government organizations only. You pay for it on a yearly basis on an agreed date in your contract and every product under the Adobe umbrella is available in this agreement and you can achieve volume discounts which vary depending on your negotiation with the ETLA. You also get 24. 7 customer support and you can easily deploy your licenses throughout your organization with the Adobe Enterprise Dashboard which is included. If you're buying with this agreement as well and with the etla you can also license by named User licensing and device based licensing as well. After that you have the Cumulative Licensing Plan or the CLP for short form. The CLP is a membership based licensing plan that allows educational, commercial and governmental organizations to purchase perpetual licenses to Adobe products for a two year term. After you've been approved for the program, you can take advantage of the CLP Points program where a discount is calculated based on the amount of software you buy. All usage of products bought under the CLP program is governed by the eula. CLP members can also exercise backwards licensing where you can use a license one version back if you already own one, and cross platform licensing where you can use a license on different operating systems as long as it doesn't exceed the total number of licenses ordered. There is also CLP for government clients who need Adobe products that can't be connected to the Internet and they must be behind a firewall. For that reason, government clients can buy Creative Cloud apps, albeit only Creative Cloud version 17 and below under the CLP. However, these apps do not get upgrade or downgrade right cannot be updated as they're not connected to the Internet. Apps come with limited support. Licensing in the CLP allows for device licensing and perpetual licensing, but only is offered for desktop products only. And finally you have the TLP or Transactional Licensing program. This program offers attractive volume pricing, no minimum order size, no membership required, or no segments. For example, you don't have to be an educational or commercial entity to buy into this program. You're able to track licenses and serial numbers. With the LWS system, there's no term length and you have access to perpetual licenses when buying under the tlp. However, when you're buying under the tlp, you can't buy certain applications. For example, most apps in the Creative Cloud will not be under this purchasing program. You'll be able to buy things like Adobe Acrobat Pro 2020 desktop only, Adobe Acrobat Standard 2020, Adobe Technical Communication Suite, Adobe Captivate, Adobe Cold Fusion Family, Adobe Flash Builder Family, Adobe Font Folio Frame Maker Family, Freehand, Photoshop Elements Premiere Elements, Adobe Presenter, and the Adobe Robo Help family. Those four purchasing programs are the main ways in which you can buy all of Adobe's products. However, there's one product line that we forgot to mention and that's the Adobe Experience Cloud. Let's take a look at how you license that in Adobe. The Experience Cloud is the premier marketing platform for enterprise sized users. The keyword being enterprise here as it's only available for commercial entities and falls under the ETLA agreement. You can also license bits and pieces of the Adobe Experience Cloud's products, web apps and services to suit your organization's needs. So let's look at how you can license Adobe's interesting Adobe Experience products. Firstly, to license any product, web application or managed service from this cloud, you'll have to book a demo with Adobe's sales team. In this demo, you will come to agreement with which components you'll buy for your business. After finishing this stage, you'll get a sales order on exactly what you're purchasing from the Adobe Experience Cloud for your organization. Here's what the typical Adobe sales order looks like after signing off on this and on the first payment of your bill, you're subject right away to the Enterprise Term Licensing Agreement. The ETLA is not a separate licensing agreement, but more of a bucket Adobe uses to group its customers in Adobe states. The ETLA is the general terms and also the product specific licensing terms grouped in together in one bucket. Inside the enterprise licensing bucket you will find the general terms which includes the lion's share of clauses you must follow and pay attention to. It has audit clauses, indemnification clauses and payment penalty details IP protection clauses, which are all important to read closely to protect yourself in case of an audit situation. These are all located inside this agreement. Then, for each Adobe Experience Cloud product or managed service added into your purchase order, you will have specific product terms and managed service terms which you are obligated to uphold as well. These terms will outline product specific definitions and information on customer obligations, how you should keep appropriate records, how you can use each product, and things such as the amount of server calls you can make and if you can use certain APIs with these products as well. It's important to read through each product's licensing to see how it interacts with the broader license licensing structures above and if your intended way of using it could cause an IP breach, accidentally or non accidentally. Now that was a lot to digest and you may want to be offline for some time now just to let this sink in. If you'd like to have some actual offline time in your work and not be worried about whether you're getting the right price on Adobe renewals or whether purchasing certain amount of licensing will cause an Adobe audit in the future, we can help you achieve that. Our Adobe software licensing experts and negotiation pros can help you have a little more offline time when dealing with your next Adobe audit or Adobe license purchasing situation and remove any unnecessary audit findings if an audit comes up. That being said, if you're interested in saving money on your Adobe licensing and reducing the amount of stress involved, click the link in the description below to get in contact with our Adobe experts. We'll reach out to you in 24 hours or less, and you'll be on your way to getting your Adobe bill under control. As always, fellow viewers, if you found this helpful, make sure to smash that like button click subscribe, and don't forget to leave a comment. Remember to keep your software safe and your assets managed. I'm Jordan and I'll see you next time. Thanks for watching SA.