Adobe Project Firefly: What is it and Why you need it

Adobe Project Firefly is a complete framework to build and deploy custom web apps on Adobe's serverless platform.

As a user or enabler of Adobe Experience Cloud products, imagine if you could build, automate, monitor, and maintain various day-to-day tasks within your Adobe Experience Cloud login — with no dependency on infrastructure, long development cycles, or third-party products.

Some use cases include:

1. Automate daily/weekly recurring reports from multiple data sources
2. Integrate data for enhanced reporting
3. Automation to append or enhance audience profiles or segments
4. Personalisation use cases
5. Create workflows and bots
6. Centralise documentation, solution design, and data dictionaries
7. Create custom apps for business, support, and technical teams
8. Monitor data pipelines and automate alerts

As a data analyst who spends a good amount of time reporting, wrangling, and integrating data from different sources — this technology may be for your team.

If you're a customer using AEP today, some of the reporting-specific use cases above are achievable within Customer Journey Analytics.

#The Data/Marketing Analyst Perspective

Adobe Experience Cloud products enable marketing and data analytics teams to meet various business goals. These products are powerful out of the box, but may not suit all enterprise requirements.

This is where you may end up building custom home-grown solutions or using paid products/services to:

• Enhance analytics reporting with custom integrations from other sources (social, ad impressions, etc.)
• Build custom dashboards, reports, and quick analysis using multiple data sources
• Export analytics data into enterprise data warehouses
• Export Adobe Analytics data into business intelligence tools
• Export real-time events to marketing automation systems
• Stream Adobe Analytics data to custom real-time dashboards
• Enhance Adobe Target profiles with first or third-party data
• Enhance analytics reporting and segmentation with customer attributes

By using the Project Firefly stack you could do most of the above.

#The Data Engineer Point of View

How Project Firefly benefits data engineers and implementation specialists:

• A complete design, application, and runtime framework to extend Adobe Experience Cloud functionality
• Highly secure — API authorisation and user access control offered out of the box
• Monitor all data pipelines for custom and out-of-box data integrations
• Get alerts on success and failures of data ingestion
• Ability to build custom monitoring dashboards and reports
• Access to scalable cloud storage
• Ability to automate testing and recurring tasks
• No infrastructure dependencies

Here's a quick look at the Adobe Project Firefly tech stack:

Source: Adobe Tech Blog

#Adobe Experience Cloud Use Cases

#Adobe Analytics

Adobe Analytics out of the box is a powerful tool that also provides flexibility to enhance and complement collected data. Project Firefly can add value by extending its reporting and integration capabilities.

#Adobe Target

Adobe Target personalisation use cases can be enhanced using Adobe I/O Runtime, enabling more sophisticated audience orchestration and profile enrichment.

#Adobe Campaign

Project Firefly can enable marketing automation by connecting Adobe Analytics and Adobe Campaign for event-driven communication workflows.

#Adobe Experience Manager

Build custom content workflows, automate asset management tasks, and extend AEM with serverless functions.

#Custom Dashboards and Insights

The ability to create your own platform with custom dashboards, visualisations, and insights — in the format that suits your organisation — is one of the most compelling uses of this framework.

#Adobe Experience Platform

Since AEP is built API-first, Project Firefly is a natural fit for building custom tools and apps across AEP use cases, including data pipeline event monitoring and data privacy workflows.

#Reference and Further Reading

Project Firefly is in developer preview. You can read more and apply here.

See the next posts in this series:

• Technical Overview
• Create Project and Bootstrap App
• Debug, Deploy, and Publish App