Adobe 2010 Annual Report Download - page 15

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• Transforming customer experiences—businesses increasingly focus their customer service and new customer
acquisition activities online, both to gain business process efficiencies and to take advantage of the opportunities
presented by new, more sophisticated technologies for analytics, optimization and targeted communications. As
they do so, enterprises and governments face rapidly changing consumer expectations, fueled by innovations across
channels and technologies—from social media and real-time collaboration, to online video and Internet-connected
television, to new mobile and Internet applications. We believe a major opportunity has emerged to provide a
platform for enterprises and governments to manage the accelerating innovation in digital experiences across
multiple channels and devices—and to deliver effective and engaged customer experiences with transformative
business results.
• Collaboration—the nature of business continues to become more social and collaborative, and enterprises and
governments are being forced to become more transparent. Customers and government constituents desire that their
online interactions be friendly and effective. As such, we believe weaving social, real-time interaction into every
customer interaction is becoming a key market opportunity, as well as a differentiation in the marketplace.
• Paper-to-digital—eliminating paper and moving to automated forms-based workflows continue to be key challenges
in enterprises and governments around the world. Paper remains prevalent throughout industries and governments,
and there are goals to drive down operational costs related to paper use and workflows involving paper-based
documents. During the past decade, there has been considerable progress made towards moving away from paper-
based workflows. However, we believe there still remains a significant opportunity to deliver solutions which focus
on this opportunity.
Given these market trends and growth drivers, we categorize our opportunities and our results into two distinct segments
within our Digital Enterprise Solutions: Knowledge Worker and Enterprise.
Knowledge Worker Market Opportunity
As part of our Digital Enterprise Solutions focus, we address the needs of the knowledge worker customer whom we
define as someone working in document intensive industries, 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,
attorneys, architects, educators, engineers, graphic designers, insurance underwriters and stock analysts. These jobs typically
require the sharing of information either as a static, published document or as a collaborative, interactive document.
Knowledge workers must create information and content from a variety of sources and 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.
Document-based collaboration among knowledge workers can occur through face-to-face meetings, via phone calls,
through e-mail or through Web conferencing technologies. Knowledge workers who 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 need capabilities such as those provided by Acrobat who have not yet licensed an Acrobat-
based solution.
Our Acrobat.com service provides centralized online file sharing and storage capabilities, as well as simple PDF
creation, an online word processor, spreadsheet, and personal Web conferencing services with Adobe ConnectNow. In