Stephen Elop, president of worldwide sales and former Macromedia CEO, is to leave the company in December, while Adobe's quarterly profit fell 18 percent on merger costs and employee stock option expenses.Adobe on June 15 announced the resignation of Stephen Elop, president of worldwide field operations. Elop will leave his position at the end of the fiscal year, on or about December 5, 2006.
Elop, formerly CEO of Macromedia, is responsible for the company's global sales organization, including field marketing, customer care and professional services.
Elop was instrumental in helping Macromedia merge with Adobe, a stock deal valued at about $3.4 billion.
Adobe also announced June 15 that its quarterly profit fell 18 percent to $123.1 million due to charges related to its acquisition of Macromedia. Adobe also cut its financial forecast for the rest of 2006.
Adobe's revenue for the three-month period ending June 2 climbed 28 percent to $635.5 million from $496 million in the same period of last year.
Adobe had warned in March that its quarterly results would be lower than expected.
Representatives from the company were not immediately available for comment.
The promise of Adobe's merger with Macromedia was the integration of Web, print and publishing software. Adobe has yet to release any software that reflects this integration.
However, Adobe did leak a few details earlier this year about a project named Apollo, which will combine PDF and Flash technologies into an off-browser presentation application.
Adobe has been forced to deal with several marketplace issues in the last year, not the least of which was Apple's announcement that it would replace its Power PC processors with Intel chips. That switch forced Adobe to develop versions of its software that can work on both chips, a code base the company calls Universal Binary.
Earlier this year, Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen said Universal Binary versions of its flagship Creative Suite would not be available until late Q2 2007, a date that is perilously close to the end range of Adobe's 18-24 month development cycle.
Adobe was recently involved in a over the latter's plans to include "save-to-PDF" functionality in Office 2007. Microsoft acquiesced to Adobe's request to remove the feature after rumors of a possible antitrust lawsuit were leaked to the press.
