Adobe on Fast Forward

Adobe’s unexpected announcement of a new CEO triggers a number of interesting questions, the most relevant of which is probably, what next? Shantanu Narayen is taking the reins of company that’s in very good shape; they’ve got strong revenue growth and a steady stream of new product launches, essentially a company that seems to be hitting on all cylinders.

So what is next? There is of course, the need to go mobile in a hurry, which has already been covered by a number of other bloggers, as well as the need to move their massive desktop applications into an on-demand delivery model. Adobe has already stated their intention to do so (over the next ten years), and took an opening foray by acquiring Virtual Ubiquity and making Buzzword available for free.

Another area that will require a strategic focus is not only taking the company’s applications off the desktop, but embedding them deeply into the production workflow of their customers. An on-demand application set facilitates this, but offering a product like Buzzword as a SaaS product is a long way from offering an enterprise grade product like Framemaker as a SaaS product (which could explain the ten year time frame).

So how to shortcut a ten year conversion process? The real issues revolve around use and perception. Astoria, for example, offers a product that operates both as a perpetual and as a hosted (SaaS) product. From an end users usage point of view, the products are indistinguishable (the SaaS version costs significantly less and deploys in weeks rather than years, but that’s a separate argument). Assuming that Adobe want to transition their application set into the cloud, an interim step could be to provide a seamless integration into a SaaS CMS that is optimized to deal with rich media applications. This enables re-use across the enterprise (create once, re-use lots of times) and would allow them to jump their conversion process forward by years, at least from the perspective of the majority of users of the application’s output.