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Back in 2009, as businesses navigated the repercussions of Wall Street\u2019s collapse, Razzak Jallow found himself standing at a departure gate with a boarding pass that read simply \u201cSaaS.\u201d

To be clear, Jallow had just nabbed a spot on Adobe Inc.\u2019s Creative Suite finance team, and the journey on which he and his colleagues were about to embark was the software company\u2019s migration from a perpetual, boxed software model to one based on SaaS subscriptions.

While Adobe was not alone, and the path to SaaS was crowded with many software firms, few were faced with exiting a legacy model that operated at the scale and robustness of Adobe\u2019s, in which 27 products were clustered under the banner of the developer\u2019s \u201cmaster collection.\u201d

\u201cThis meant that 27 R&D teams had to ship their product on the same exact day,\u201d recalls Jallow, whose comment seems to expose both the madness as well as the unmatched rigor behind Adobe\u2019s legacy model.   

Still, cracks were visible inside the perpetual world.

\u201cWe were selling fewer units every single quarter, and meanwhile we were spending more and more on go-to-market initiatives to try to get customers to upgrade,\u201d continues Jallow, who notes that the migration to a subscription business model got into high gear only once Adobe management uniformly agreed that \u201cit was time to do what was right for the customer.\u201d

According to Jallow, the customer-centric message began to gain momentum inside the Creative Suite business unit where he had been spending his days modeling revenue predictions to better serve the investment community.

Still, a finance leadership challenge remained. At the time, Jallow remembers, Adobe\u2019s then-CFO, Mark Garrett, stated: \u201cOur current investors may not like it because they trade us on quarterly revenues and EBITDA  \u2013 but I\u2019m going to go find us new investors.\u201d

Garrett\u2019s resolve to find new investors rather than muddy Adobe\u2019s customer-focus message further buttressed the company\u2019s stance.

Says Jallow: \u201cObserving a CFO who saw beyond his own world and understood the products and customers and how the different teams worked together was just really impactful for me. Moments like that just don\u2019t come around very often.\u201d \u2013Jack Sweeney