Adobe 2009 Annual Report Download - page 13

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Enterprise Market Opportunity
Enterprises are under increasing pressure to save money, offer improved customer service, adhere to regulatory
requirements and leverage existing investments in core systems. As a means to address these issues, a critical component of
an organization’s business processes is the need to interact with data stored in enterprise applications. As this need expands
beyond the core users of those applications, adapting systems to accommodate a diverse group of users—including those
within and those external to the organization—has become an expensive and time-consuming endeavor. The outcome is a
proliferation of manual workarounds that result in process inefficiencies, delays and poor quality of information.
In addition, enterprises have built Web applications which enjoy the reach of the Web but often fail to deliver a user
interface with the ease of use and richness that users expect. This impedes utilization of these applications and increases
training costs, and reduces the overall return on investment (“ROI”) that enterprises expect. Organizations are now looking to
RIAs to boost their ROI for these Web applications by combining a rich graphical application interface with the universal
reach of the Web.
We believe significant opportunities exist to help enterprises address these issues by making their business processes
more efficient and their Web applications more engaging. We also believe forward-thinking enterprises are actively investing
in disruptive processes to engage more meaningfully with customers, and the employees and partners who serve them.
Enterprises want to leverage these dynamic human interactions to create a more effective customer interaction model which
accelerates acquisition and retention.
To address these opportunities, we offer a platform for enterprises and governments to build Customer Interaction
Solutions (“CIS”) utilizing our Adobe LiveCycle Enterprise Suite (“ES”) solutions to securely extend the reach of
information, processes and services to engage with customers and constituents. Our CIS solutions leverage our Adobe Reader
and the Adobe Flash Platform which help businesses and government agencies inspire commitment in their customers and
constituents by engaging them—anywhere, anytime and in any medium through our universal clients and application
solutions.
Our Adobe Flash Platform enables reliable, secure and rich application experiences across browsers, desktops and
devices. The platform provides developers with an RIA programming model to integrate and optimize workflows and a
server software framework to simplify integration and leverage existing enterprise infrastructures. We also offer CIS services
and other software components to accelerate the creation of compelling, relevant and actionable applications, either through
RIAs or through intelligent electronic documents based on Adobe PDF.
To improve their collaboration and communication capabilities, we believe enterprises will increasingly utilize real-time
communication to improve how they train, market, sell and support their products and solutions to their customers. For this
reason, we now include our Adobe Acrobat Connect Pro product line as part of our CIS offerings. Connect Pro provides
capabilities via Adobe Flash Player for live Web conferencing, as well as delivering on-demand rich presentations through an
on-premise server or as a hosted service. By also offering Web conferencing services as part of our LiveCycle family of
products, 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.
Although our solutions address the needs of a diverse set of enterprise customers, we focus primarily on two key vertical
industries: financial services and government. To a lesser extent, we also target vertical markets such as media and
entertainment, manufacturing, telecommunications and healthcare. For all these customers, we offer comprehensive, scalable,
secure and reliable server products and tools to develop applications tailored to their specific information and business
process requirements.
Enterprise Business Summary
In fiscal 2009, revenue performance for our Enterprise products was better than Adobe’s overall business. Despite the
negative macro-economic backdrop, overall LiveCycle revenue declined only slightly on a year-over-year basis. A
contributing factor to the year-over-year decline in our LiveCycle revenue was our strategic decision to focus less on
consulting services as a component of overall LiveCycle revenue during the year. With increased consulting support by
systems integrators such as Cognizant, Deloitte and Tata Consulting, we downsized our consulting organization and the
revenue aspirations associated with it as we entered fiscal 2009—and focused our revenue generation primarily on the
licensing of our LiveCycle solutions.