Adobe 2011 Annual Report Download - page 28

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capabilities, as well as social and sharing features. In addition to competing with our own mobile applications such as Photoshop
Express, our Lightroom product and our Elements hobbyist products, these products could start to encroach upon the feature sets
of our professional tools.
Applications for digital video editing, motion graphics, special effects, audio creation and DVD authoring face increasing
competition as video professionals and hobbyists migrate towards the use of digital camcorders and digital video production on
their computers, and DVD systems and online video for rich media playback. Our After Effects, Adobe Audition, Encore, Adobe
Premiere Pro and Soundbooth software products, as well as the Adobe Production Premium suite which contains these products,
face competition from companies such as Apple, Avid, Canopus (owned by Grass Valley), Sonic (owned by Rovi) and Sony.
Our Adobe Premiere Elements software product, which is targeted for use by hobbyists, faces competition from companies
such as Apple, ArcSoft, Autodesk, Avid, Broderbund, Corel, Magix, Microsoft and Sony as well as video editing capabilities found
in operating systems, hosted SaaS solutions, video editing solutions bundled by video camcorder manufacturers with their hardware
offerings, and video editing solutions bundled onto smartphones. Similarly, we face potential competition from operating system
manufacturers such as Apple with its iMovie and iDVD products and Microsoft with its Windows Movie Maker product as they
integrate or offer hobbyist-level digital imaging and image management features with their operating systems.
We believe we compete favorably against other digital imaging, digital video and consumer-focused image management
software applications with our Adobe Photoshop Elements and Adobe Premiere Elements products due to strong consumer
awareness of our brand in digital imaging and digital video, our relationships with significant OEMs, positive recommendations
for our products by market influencers, our focus on the retail software channel and strong feature sets.
After Effects is a leader in professional compositing and visual effects due to its strong feature set and its integration with
our other products that helps create a broad video editing platform for our customers. In professional digital video editing, we are
an industry leader with Adobe Premiere Pro and compete favorably due to our strong feature set, our OEM relationships and the
integration with our other products to create a broad digital video publishing platform for our customers.
With our Acrobat business, we continue to face competition from Microsoft. Their widely used Office product offers a
feature to save Microsoft Office documents as PDF documents, which competes with Acrobat. They also 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
Acrobat market opportunity.
Our 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 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 security.
Digital Marketing
The markets in which our Digital Marketing business unit competes are growing rapidly and characterized by intense
competition. Our Digital Marketing solutions face competition from large companies such as Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, Oracle,
IBM, HP, salesforce.com and others, in addition to point product solutions and focused competitors. Additionally, new competitors
are constantly entering these markets, increasing competition. Certain of these competitors provide software on demand to
customers, generally through a web browser, or provide software that is installed by customers directly on their servers. In addition,
we compete at times with our customers' or potential customers' internally developed applications. Of the competitors listed, no
single company has products identical to our Digital Marketing offerings. Our Digital Marketing solutions compete in a variety
of areas, including: reporting and analytics; multi-channel marketing and optimization; online and social marketing; web experience
management and others.
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