PDF people can use Apollo to make lightweight, rich-media, Reader-less apps delivering content formerly marooned inside PDF documents to a host of platforms.Adobe released the first alpha version of Apollo to developers March 26 at AjaxWorld in New York. While it may prove to be more exciting to AJAX and Flex experts on the ex-Macromedia side of the Adobe multimedia empire, from what we've heard PDF people can use Apollo to make lightweight, rich-media, Reader-less apps delivering content formerly marooned inside PDF documents to a host of platforms.
CEO Bruce Chizen said that the users of all Adobe software from Illustrator to Acrobat to all the ex-Macromedia platforms will be able to develop their own little Internet apps—that won't need a browser to run—with the free Apollo run-time tool.
As soon as next week, he added, Adobe will provide a series demo apps to give developers an idea of the things they will be able to create with Apollo.
Acrobat 8 sales strong
Meanwhile, it was a huge quarter for Acrobat, in fact the second best of all time as Adobe logged $143.9 million of income (Acrobat and its PDF software cousins accounted for 26 percent of overall revenues). Despite flat sales overall for Adobe, Acrobat 8 was up both in units and in revenue compared with a similar period during Acrobat 7's release cycle.
The thing is, this quarter should have stunk—winter usually does—and it didn't. Not only did customers buy into Acrobat 8 (even without the wow factor) faster than they did Acrobat 7, Adobe execs said those stats don't even take into account that some high-volume customers held back from buying the new version because of a snafu with the new Adobe Licensing Manager. Adobe recently shipped an Acrobat update that bypasses the anti-piracy scheme altogether.
"Piracy is a considerable issue for us with Acrobat," said Shantanu Narayen, Adobe's president and chief operating officer. "In [Acrobat] 7 we put activation for retail, and we tried to extend that into the enterprise, because even in the enterprise there is a fair amount of leakage ... [but] we made the decision to disable the Licensing Manager."
Other sales quirks in the first quarter, too, will be in Adobe's rearview mirror. That makes the second quarter look pretty rosy, too, Chizen and his colleagues said.
No matter what the media says about Battleship Acrobat and the unexciting technology that is PDF, the numbers don't lie: People are buying it by the truckload. Narayen said that the biggest deals the company made for the quarter included ones with:
- Renault of France, who is buying 5,000 boxes of the high-end Acrobat 3D for its design teams and supply chain partners
- The Ohio Department of Taxation, converting to LiveCycle electronic forms
- The Belgian Prime Minister's office, which plans to archive its documents electronically in PDF/A format
More noteworthy news
Other items from the world of PDF and its parent company:
- The Adobe Max show, Investor Relations VP Mike Saviage announced, will be held in Chicago Sept. 30-Oct. 3.
- After longtime CFO Murray Demo left the company last year, his replacement Mark Garrett joined the quarterly financial call for the first time. In introducing himself to the crowd of audioconference listeners he actually said, "I'm excited to be here," and brought a refreshingly enthusiastic tone to the proceedings that hasn't been heard in years. Of course, announcing good financial news probably made that easier.
- Give credit to Adobe for home cooking: Whether you like it or not, interested parties can only access playback of the call via Acrobat Connect, instead of the good old "MP3 archive page" the company formerly put up on its site. In an announcement separate from the financial call, Adobe tried to trump up support for Connect by announcing a deal with Trump University in which Apprentice contestants host business Webinars with the Web-conferencing software.
- Apparently, Adobe wants us to believe the hype for Creative Suite 3 (of which Acrobat's a piece), to be released next week and Adobe expects to ship in the second quarter. Adobe execs referred to it as the "biggest release" of the company's "25-year history" no fewer than four times during the financial call.
"Revolutionary," Narayen said CS3 shall be. Whether that's a wish or impending reality, of course, remains to be seen. But one can tell the Adobe brass is definitely pumped and jacked—to borrow one of USC football coach Pete Carroll's favorite phrases—a peculiarly giddy feeling they brought to these normally staid financial reports.
