Adobe 2010 Annual Report Download - page 32

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offer a proprietary digital rights management technology and a document format, called XML Paper Specification (“XPS”),
which competes with Adobe PDF. Given Microsoft’ s market dominance, the PDF feature in Office, XPS, and any other
competitive Microsoft product or technology that is bundled as part of its Office product or operating system or made freely
available, could harm our overall Adobe Acrobat market opportunity.
Our Adobe Acrobat product family also faces competition in the PDF file creation market from many clone products
marketed by companies such as AdLib, Active PDF, Apple, Global Graphics, Nuance, Software995, Sourcenext and others.
In addition, other PDF creation solutions can be found at a low cost, or for free, on the Web.
For customers that use Adobe Acrobat as part of document collaboration and document process management solutions,
where electronic document delivery, exchange, collaboration, security and archival needs exist, our Acrobat product family
faces competition from entrenched office applications such as Microsoft Office and its integration with its SharePoint
product. In the higher end of the electronic document market, Acrobat Pro and Acrobat Pro Extended provide features which
compete with other creative professional PDF tool providers, such as Enfocus, Dalim and Zinio. Google’ s Google Apps set
of products also provides document creation and collaboration capabilities, including the ability to preview PDF documents,
which can be used as an alternative to our collaboration features in Acrobat.
To address these competitive threats, we are working to ensure our Adobe Acrobat applications stay at the forefront of
innovation in emerging opportunities such as PDF document generation, document collaboration and document process
management.
Our Web conferencing solution, Adobe Connect, faces competition from many Web conferencing vendors, including
Cisco WebEx, Microsoft Office Live Meeting (now a part of their Microsoft Lync offering), IBM Lotus Sametime and Citrix
GoToMeeting. Cisco WebEx is a market share leader and Microsoft has steadily increased its marketing of its solution.
The markets we address with our Adobe LiveCycle Enterprise Suite are influenced by evolving industry standards, rapid
software and hardware technology developments, and new product introductions from competitors such as Microsoft and
IBM.
Microsoft has already brought to market new products and technologies to address many of the emerging market needs
we focus on with our Adobe LiveCycle family of products. Microsoft continues to offer its eForms solution called InfoPath
in certain versions of Microsoft Office and has added Office Forms Services which extends their forms to users as MS
Outlook e-mail messages or to Web browsers rather than the InfoPath client. They also continue to offer their Windows
Rights Management Services in their Windows Server product which is designed to allow corporate networks to manage and
enforce restrictions built into documents.
Certain Windows operating systems contain a proprietary digital rights management technology which competes with
Adobe LiveCycle Rights Management ES. In addition, Microsoft’ s most recent version of Office includes an updated version
of its SharePoint product which competes with certain aspects of our Adobe LiveCycle products. Microsoft has also recently
delivered technology called Windows Presentation Foundation and Silverlight which offers an alternative to building RIA
applications within the Microsoft .NET framework.
In the electronic forms solution market, in addition to competition from Microsoft Infopath based solutions, we face
competition from IBM through their eForms solution recently rebranded as Lotus Workplace Forms. Similarly, we face
competition for document process management solutions from workflow solution vendors such as PegaSystems, Lombardi,
Nuance and Ultimus.
Our overall offering for CEM solutions competes with offerings such as IBM's Project Northstar, recently renamed the
IBM Customer Experience Suite. We also expect to compete with similar offerings from other major vendors with similar
portfolios, such as Microsoft and Oracle. We believe that we compete favorably in this emerging market based on our
extensive track record of delivering industry-leading tools for creating compelling experiences our WCM focus on global,
multi-brand, multi-language Websites; the strength of our Web analytics platform; the breadth and power of our tools for
building multi-screen and multi-channel applications; our long-standing and broad partnerships with system integrators and
interactive agencies; our deep background in user-centric design; the superior functionality and broad range of our PDF
solutions; and our scalability and performance.
Our WCM solution, acquired from Day, competes with general enterprise content platforms, including products from
Autonomy, EMC, IBM, OpenText, and Oracle, as well as more specialized solutions, including products from Alfresco,
FatWire, CoreMedia, Percussion, and SDL. In addition, there are low-cost and open source alternatives, such as Drupal,
Joomla!, and WordPress. We believe that we compete favorably with both the enterprise and low-cost alternatives, based on
our strong feature set; focus on global, multi-brand, multi-language Websites; superior user experience; tools for building