Back in 2009, as businesses navigated the repercussions of Wall Street’s collapse, Razzak Jallow found himself standing at a departure gate with a boarding pass that read simply “SaaS.”

To be clear, Jallow had just nabbed a spot on Adobe Inc.’s Creative Suite finance team, and the journey on which he and his colleagues were about to embark was the software company’s 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’s, in which 27 products were clustered under the banner of the developer’s “master collection.”

“This meant that 27 R&D teams had to ship their product on the same exact day,” recalls Jallow, whose comment seems to expose both the madness as well as the unmatched rigor behind Adobe’s legacy model.   

Still, cracks were visible inside the perpetual world.

“We 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,” continues Jallow, who notes that the migration to a subscription business model got into high gear only once Adobe management uniformly agreed that “it was time to do what was right for the customer.”

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’s then-CFO, Mark Garrett, stated: “Our current investors may not like it because they trade us on quarterly revenues and EBITDA  – but I’m going to go find us new investors.”

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

Says Jallow: “Observing 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’t come around very often.” –Jack Sweeney