Adobe Systems

Adobe believes in the future. And provides the most compelling tools for content-creation and site-management. Amrita Ghosh of IT@TT managed to catch up with Nick Hodge and Himanshu
Goyal in Bangalore. Here are excerpts.

IT@TT: What's your "Shred The Web" Road Show about?

NH: Over the past 3 months, we have been developing and shipping web-related applications like LiveMotion and GoLive and web-specific features for PhotoShop and Illustrator. We are show casing our web related tools.

IT@TT: Why did you choose just Bangalore and Mumbai for this 'Show?

HG: Bit of a commercial reason actually. Mumbai happens to be the publishing seat of technology and from the technical perspective it takes news forward. We feel Bangalore is the developer's paradise in content and e-commerce enabled content for web sites or for third parties. It's the ideal ground for us to keep in touch with developers and tell them what we are advocating. However, it's not as if we are concentrating on these two places only, we may take it to other places such as Delhi and Chennai sometime.

IT@TT: What was the crowd-reaction?

NH: Very positive. Most of them, say about 80-90 percent were Adobe's traditional customers who use our tools day in and day out. And who probably know more than you or I about these tools. There were instances, especially based on the questions I got, that actually set the crowd cheering. The atmosphere was very interactive.

HG: The good thing about doing a road show in Bangalore is that there is a massive turnout, we had 900 registered participants.

IT@TT: Was there space to accommodate the large crowd?

NH: O yes, there was! But beyond a point they seemed to be more comfortable on tables! So I think they know that we have put in our best effort. The bottom line is that we are delivering value to them, so standing or sitting didn't really matter to them.

IT@TT: What's Adobe's role in network publishing?

NH: Network publishing is our vision for web publishing per se. The whole game of web publishing, print publishing, video publishing and television for the web. We see content creation as a part of the 3rd wave. The 1st wave was traditional desktop publishing, the 2nd wave being web publishing and the 3rd wave combines all these together. We cannot do all this alone so we have alliances with companies like Nokia, HP, ATG, Real Networks and Apple. The alliances are very important to our customers as they see tremendous value in these partnerships and we at Adobe really believe in them.

IT@TT: Tell us something about LiveMotion and how its compares to Macromedia Flash?

NH: LiveMotion really stands out as an animation tool and a tool to integrate all the elements in a web site. Most of our customers already use PhotoShop to do image work. We can take that PhotoShop image and import it into LiveMotion, not having to worry about different file formats and so on. It is the same case with Illustrator. You can edit the LiveMotion object in PhotoShop while LiveMotion applies its various filters to it. You can then put it right back into LiveMotion and export it out as a file format that is excellent for the web. It easily integrates with the tools that people are already using, which is the best part of LiveMotion. Plus it is much simpler to animate with the time line feature, which we have taken from our video tool - After Effects. So LiveMotion mostly stand out in all these areas.

IT@TT: What is your marketing and distribution channel?

HG: We have 3 main distributors in India - Wipro, Summit Data Products and Pacific Technologies for distribution of our products. So Adobe sells to distributors who in turn stock several resellers who are spread across the country.

IT@TT: So when did you actually come up with these products and what are the other products that you will be demonstrating?

NH: PhotoShop 6.0 would be the latest; probably be 4-5 weeks more. GoLive 5.0 came out in early September. And Illustrator 9. LiveMotion and Illustrator were developed around May this year but both have received updates. It's a good time because they all work so nicely together and it's difficult to show one product in isolation. We need to show them integrated together.

IT@TT: Some of the products were developed at the Adobe center at Noida, right?

HG: Adobe has a soft corner for India. At Noida we have the extended arm of the US center. There is a 70-member team in development working on advanced technology and they provide scalability to all our products. Putting a PhotoShop file in GoLive 5.0 was developed entirely in India.

IT@TT: So where do you see Adobe a few years from now?

NH: I think the Network Publishing vision really gives the best clue to where I see Adobe. The Acrobat Reader has been a significant reason for that and the growth of the Web. People wanting to see Acrobat Reader have come to the Adobe web site and suddenly been confronted with the brand name 'Adobe' which they've associated with desktop publishing for a long time. We have tremendous brand recognition and it's growing by the day.

We see the emergence of smaller devices coming in a big way into content dissemination and this figures big in our vision. We also need to compare the way we manage content from current sites and all these are tied up as part of our vision of Network Publishing. What Adobe is doing now, is critical for the next couple of years. I see Adobe in a lot more places then they are today. We are talking a holistic concept of publishing, are partnering with the best, and have a whole lot of stuff coming. All of which will definitely create value.

Interviewed By Amrita Ghosh
[email protected]

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