Adobe 2007 Annual Report Download - page 11

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The focus of our Business Productivity Business Unit is to provide solutions which meet the needs of enterprises to
improve their productivity, help automate business processes, improve collaboration and reduce time-to-market and costs.
Knowledge Worker Market Opportunity
As part of our Business Productivity Solutions focus, we address the needs of the knowledge worker customer who we
define as someone focused on creating and disseminating high-value information as part of their job on a regular basis.
Knowledge workers include a wide variety of job functions—such as accountants, administrative assistants, executives,
architects, educators, engineers, graphic designers, insurance underwriters, software developers and stock analysts—just to
name a few. These jobs typically require the sharing of information, either in an information dissemination (one-way) format,
or in a collaborative (multi-way) format.
Knowledge workers must create information and content from a variety of software applications, and be able to
exchange this information within a reliable format that ensures coworkers and constituents can reliably and securely access
the information. When appropriate, this information often needs to be protected or securely managed and controlled.
Collaboration among knowledge workers can occur through face-to-face meetings, via phone calls, through e-mail or
through Web conferencing technologies. Knowledge workers that participate in collaborations with their colleagues may be
located in offices next door to each other, or in different parts of the world. These team members may change with every
project and either be part of an organization’ s employee base, or be an external consultant or third party partner.
We believe there is a significant opportunity to provide solutions which enable knowledge workers to communicate and
collaborate across technical, geographical and social boundaries, both inside and outside of their companies. We believe that
with such solutions, users can collaborate and efficiently manage feedback from their colleagues in both real time and on-
demand, and control how, when and by whom information is accessed.
Since the early 1990s, our Acrobat family of products has provided for the reliable creation and exchange of electronic
documents, regardless of platform or application source type. Users can collaborate on documents with electronic comments
and tailor the security of a file in order to distribute reliable Adobe PDF documents that can be viewed, printed or interacted
with utilizing the free Adobe Reader. Available in different versions which target a variety of user needs, Adobe Acrobat
provides essential electronic document capabilities and services to help knowledge workers accomplish a wide range of ad
hoc tasks involving digital documents ranging from simple publications to forms to mission critical engineering and
architectural plans. Although Acrobat has achieved strong market adoption in document-intensive industries such as
government, financial services, pharmaceutical, legal, aerospace, insurance and technical publishing, we believe there are
tens of millions of users who require capabilities such as those provided by Acrobat who have not yet licensed an Acrobat
based solution.
In addition to sharing and collaborating on documents reliably across disparate platforms with Acrobat, we believe there
is an adjacent market opportunity whereby knowledge workers will increasingly utilize Web conferencing solutions to more
effectively collaborate and consult with their colleagues, partners and customers. We also believe businesses will increasingly
utilize Web conferencing to improve how they train, market, sell and support their products and solutions to their customers.
Our Adobe Acrobat Connect provides capabilities via the Adobe Flash Player for live Web conferencing, as well as
delivering on-demand rich presentations. By integrating accessibility to the functionality of Acrobat Connect from Acrobat
and the free Adobe Reader, we believe we can extend adoption of Web conferencing to a broader potential market and grow
the use of such technology with an easy-to-adopt business model.
Knowledge Worker Business Summary
Our business targeting knowledge workers achieved record revenue and solid year-over-year growth in fiscal 2007. The
largest component of this business was revenue generated by our Acrobat family of products, driven by continued adoption
of Adobe Acrobat version 8.0 throughout the year.
The version 8 product family offers enhanced features that allow workgroups to manage a range of essential business
activities such as assembling documents from multiple sources, controlling security and access to sensitive information,
enabling the creation and filling out of intelligent electronic forms and more effectively collaborating on documents and