Adobe Systems Incorporated has announced that it has acquired Behance, a leading online creative showcase and community. Behance currently has over 1 million active members and hosts over 3 million artistic projects, which received over 90 million views in the last month. Adobe has plans to integrate the Behance site, community and portfolio features into its own Creative Cloud service and it hopes to benefit from synergies between the businesses; that the sum will be greater than the parts.
Adobe is famous for its industry standard creative software and feels the ready-made creative focussed community of Behance will fit very nicely into its own Creative Cloud, introduced by the company last year. The Creative Cloud service is sold on a subscription basis and includes Adobe’s leading CS6 creative software tools and web-based services such as storage, device synchronisation and community features. A Creative Cloud membership for an individual which includes access to every piece of CS6 software, 20GB of cloud storage and full access to other online services costs £46.88 per month with an annual commitment.
Talking about the new acquisition Adobe’s David Wadhwani, senior vice president and general manager, said “Behance will play a key role in Adobe’s efforts to serve the creative world in the years to come and will accelerate our efforts to enable a more open and collaborative creative community”. Obviously if a good proportion of the Behance.net creatives decide to hop on board with a paid Creative Cloud subscription Adobe will be very happy indeed.
Scott Belsky, co-founder and chief executive officer, Behance said that “We're thrilled to join Adobe and empower creative careers on a global scale”. Also in its own press-release concerning the acquisition, the Behance team said “Our mission to connect and empower the creative world is getting a big boost today”.
Behance was founded in 2006 and was a privately held company. All of Behance’s 32 employees will become Adobe employees but stay in New York. For now there will be no changes to the free and paid offerings available to current Behance users. In a Q&A with Behance it was confirmed that “users can and will continue to join Behance for free and showcase their creative work”. The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
