Adobe 2012 Annual Report Download - page 32

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Our Adobe Social offerings compete primarily with social monitoring platforms such as Radian6 (owned by salesforce.com)
and Visible Technologies, as well as with social marketing companies such as Buddy Media (owned by Salesforce.com), Lithium
Technologies, Vitrue (owned by Oracle) and Wildfire (owned by Google).
Our Experience Manager solution competes with: general enterprise content platforms, including products from
Documentum (owned by EMC), HP (which acquired Autonomy), IBM, OpenText, and Oracle (which acquired FatWire); content
management tools like Microsoft SharePoint; large-scale WEM systems from companies such as Vignette (owned by OpenText);
and more specialized solutions, including products from Alfresco, CoreMedia, Percussion, and SDL. In addition, there are low-
cost and open source alternatives, such as Drupal, Joomla!, and WordPress.
Many of the companies with which we compete offer a variety of products or services and as a result could also bundle
their products or services, which may result in these companies effectively selling their products or services at or below market
prices. In addition, large software, internet and database management companies have expanded and enhanced their offerings in
the digital marketing area, either by developing competing services or by acquiring existing competitors or strategic partners of
ours. For example, Apple provides its iAd service, Google offers both a free and premium web analytics service and acquired
DoubleClick, one of our strategic partners, in 2007. Also, Microsoft offers a web analytics service, and offers Microsoft Advertising,
which is based on Microsoft's 2007 acquisition of aQuantive; Yahoo! also offers a web analytics service based on its acquisition
of IndexTools; Salesforce.com acquired Buddy Media and Radian6 to provide services to monitor and analyze social media
conversations; Oracle acquired Endeca Technologies, FatWire, Involver and Vitrue and has entered into a definitive agreement to
acquire Eloqua, and HP acquired Autonomy (which had previously acquired Interwoven) to increase their presences in the digital
marketing space; and IBM, with its Coremetrics and Unica acquisitions, has extended its e-retailing offering in an initiative it calls
Project Northstar. These competitors, given their significant resources and preexisting relationships with our current and potential
customers, could compete effectively against us.
We believe competitive factors in our markets include the proven performance, security, scalability, flexibility and reliability
of services; the strategic relationships and integration with third-party applications; the intuitiveness and visual appeal of services'
user interfaces; the low total cost of ownership and demonstrable cost-effective benefits to customers; the ability of services to
provide N-dimensional segmentation of information; pricing; the flexibility and adaptability of services to match changing business
demands; enterprise-level customer service and training; perceived market leadership; the usability of services, including services
being easy to learn and remember, efficient and visually compelling; the real-time availability of data and reporting; independence
from portals and search engines; the ability to deploy the services globally and to provide multi-currency, multi-language and
multi-character support and to have a local presence in international markets; and success in educating customers in how to utilize
services effectively. We believe that we compete favorably with both the enterprise and low-cost alternatives, based on many of
these competitive factors including our strong feature set, the breadth of our offerings, our focus on global, multi-brand, multi-
language websites, our superior user experience, tools for building multi-screen, multi-channel applications, standards-based
architecture, scalability and performance and leadership in industry standards efforts.
Our web conferencing solution, Adobe Connect, faces competition from many web conferencing vendors, including Cisco
WebEx, Microsoft Office Live Meeting (now a part of their Microsoft Lync offering), IBM Lotus Sametime and Citrix GoToMeeting
(and their recent acquisition of NetViewer). Cisco WebEx is a market share leader, and Microsoft has steadily increased its marketing
of its solution as well as acquired Skype which is a service that enables video calls via the internet. Microsoft has brought to market
products and technologies to address many of the market needs we focus on with our LiveCycle family of products. Microsoft
offers its eForms solution called InfoPath in certain versions of Microsoft Office and has added Office Forms Services which
extends their forms to users as MS Outlook e-mail messages or to web browsers rather than the InfoPath client. They also continue
to offer their Windows Rights Management Services in their Windows Server product which is designed to allow corporate networks
to manage and enforce restrictions built into documents.
Certain Windows operating systems contain a proprietary digital rights management technology which competes with our
LiveCycle Rights Management. In addition, Microsoft's Office product includes SharePoint which competes with certain aspects
of our LiveCycle products. Microsoft has also delivered technology called Windows Presentation Foundation and Silverlight
which offers 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 eForms solution recently rebranded as Lotus Workplace Forms. Similarly, we face competition
for document process management solutions from workflow solution vendors such as PegaSystems, Lombardi (owned by IBM),
Nuance and Ultimus.
Print and Publishing
Our Print and Publishing product line targets many markets. In technical authoring and publishing, our Adobe FrameMaker
product faces competition from large-scale electronic publishing systems, XML-based publishing companies such as PTC, as well
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