Adobe 2005 Annual Report Download - page 23

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23
Avalon) which is expected to ship as part of the Windows Vista release in 2006, and which will offer 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 acquisition of an eForms solution company called PureEdge, other
regional based eForm solution providers, and from FileNET’s electronic form solutions. Similarly, we face
competition for document process management solutions from workflow solution vendors such as FileNET,
MetaStorm, Scansoft and Ultimus.
We believe that our Adobe LiveCycle server product family competes favorably against these companies and
formats in terms of the combined benefits of superior functionality, cross-platform visual page fidelity/reliability,
multi-platform capability, file compression, printing and security of documents expressed using Adobe PDF. We
also believe that Adobe PDF and its integration with XML, combined with the broad distribution of Adobe Reader
on all leading hardware platforms, provide a ubiquitous universal multi-platform solution that is more compelling
than our competitors’ offerings.
As we broaden the scope of products and solutions offered with our Enterprise and Developer Solutions
products, we face increased competition from entrenched office applications, emerging products/technologies and
potentially, enterprise collaboration system providers. Additionally, current office applications and content
creation/management tools that use HTML, Microsoft Word, Tagged Information File Format (“TIFF”) and various
XML-based formats for electronic document distribution provide alternate solutions to customers, and indirectly
compete with our enterprise server products and the use of Adobe PDF.
Our Macromedia Flex server product provides a solution for Java, C++ and C Sharp programmers wanting to deploy
Enterprise class, rich Web applications and leverages Macromedia Flash Player technology. Beyond the competitive
Microsoft threats previously discussed, vendors such as Tibco and NexaWeb offer competitive solutions in the RIA
market that we target with Flex. In addition, new open source technologies like AJAX provide alternative methods
for creating RIAs. Numerous open source groups, as well as a number of commercial software vendors are working
to build tools and frameworks that could make AJAX competitive with Flex.
Our Macromedia ColdFusion products face competition from major vendors including Microsoft, IBM, BEA
and Sun. In addition, ColdFusion competes with several technologies available today at no cost including the PHP
and PERL programming environments that are available for the Apache Web server.
Other
In technical authoring and publishing, our Adobe FrameMaker product faces competition from large-scale
electronic publishing systems, XML-based publishing companies such as PTC (via their acquisition of Arbortext),
as well as lower-end desktop publishing products such as Microsoft Word. Competition is based on the quality and
features of products, the level of customization and integration with other publishing system components, the
number of hardware platforms supported, service and price. We believe we can successfully compete based upon the
quality and features of the Adobe FrameMaker product and our extensive application programming interface.
In desktop publishing, our Adobe PageMaker product faces competition from other software products,
including Microsoft Publisher. Competition is based on the quality and features of products, ease-of-use, printer
service support, and price. We believe we have a strong product and can successfully compete with these types of
applications based upon the quality and features of the Adobe PageMaker product, its strong brand among users, and
its widespread adoption among printer service bureaus.
In printing technologies, we believe the principal competitive factors for OEMs in selecting a page description
language or a printing technology are product capabilities, market leadership, reliability, price, support and engi-
neering development assistance. We believe that our competitive advantages include our technology competency,
OEM customer relationships and intellectual property portfolio. Adobe PostScript faces competition from
Hewlett-Packard’s proprietary PCL page description language and from developers of other page description
languages based on the PostScript language standard, including Global Graphics and Xionics. In addition, as
previously discussed, Microsoft has announced its next generation operating system, called Windows Vista, which is