Adobe's Q3, Q4 outlook fall short, but Creative Cloud surges

Adobe's third quarter results fell short of expectations, but the company continues to prove it can transition to be a software as a service player.

The company reported third quarter earnings of $83 million, or 16 cents a share, on revenue of $995.1 million, a tally that was down from $1.08 billion a year ago. Non-GAAP earnings were 32 cents a share. Wall Street was expecting Adobe to report third quarter earnings of 34 cents a share on revenue of $1.01 billion.

On the positive side of the ledger, Adobe said that it has more than 1 million Creative Cloud subscriptions with strong enterprise adoption. Cloud revenue for Adobe was up 28 percent in the third quarter to $254.9 million.

CEO Shantanu Narayen said that Adobe was on a $1 billion annual revenue run rate with its marketing cloud.

As for the outlook, Adobe projected fourth quarter revenue of $1 billion to $1.05 billion with non-GAAP earnings of 28 cents a share to 34 cents a share. Wall Street was expecting fourth quarter earnings of 41 cents a share on revenue of $1.08 billion.