In his new job as Bentley Systems vice president for platform product management, former Adobe Acrobat team member will oversee development and management of Bentley’s MicroStation CAD app and ProjectWise, its server-based project collaboration product. Both apps leverage PDF to help public and private civil engineers build infrastructure projects such as roads and bridges.

On the surface, there doesn't look to be much of a connection between Adobe and Bentley. Under the hood, however, there's a lot: Bentley licenses Adobe PDF libraries so that its various apps can output to PDF. Furthermore, PDF serves as a bridge between the company's proprietary application files and the outside world, making it possible for people who don't have MicroStation on their computers to view renderings of projects--in whatever multiple views they need--with Adobe Reader.

PDF also, Vitelli says, helps enable printing from Bentley apps to large-format plotters, as well as provides a format for organized, bookmarked, and hyperlinked "job packages" that assemble information about multiple aspects of a project from multiple applications (from CAD to Visio and other Microsoft Office apps) into one file--and that can also foster collaboration via commenting during review cycles.

"The more we can enable our users to package up their work and get it out for approval and to get paid, the better off we all are for it," Vitelli says. "We license the Adobe libraries because we want to make PDF assembly and security as easy and ubiquitous as possible. It's in our best interest."

He says that while many Bentley software users are assigning password protection to their documents, the intellectual-theft issues associated with other industries aren't as acute among civil engineers.

"The main reason our users like PDF is because it's immutable--you can't change it," Vitelli says. "Our users, as much as any other in the industry, use a very broad set of applications and data types. PDF is just a beautiful container to lay all this information out into a digital work package."

Vitelli says that's the beauty of PDF, and why he feels the document format has survived multiple challenges from Microsoft over the years, and why it now is the choice of a lot of public and private organizations despite open-source alternatives. Moving forward, he says, PDF's flexibility, approval as an ISO standard, and platform-independence will protect its mindshare as Linux and Macintosh mount new challenges to an embattled Windows.

In effect, PDF is above the fray, although Adobe--like all software developers--will have to keep close track of what transpires in the market while the sand shifts under the various operating systems.

"People are comfortable with it, it's a page orientation, it displays well. . . . The beauty's in its simplicity and the value proposition it offers," Vitelli says. The challenge for Adobe isn't to necessarily defend PDF against competitors, he says, "but to get people to do more with it."

Vitelli finished his tenure at Adobe in 2006 as vice president of alliances, which involved working with business software vendors such as SAP and EMC. Earlier, he had been senior director of product management, working with other top Acrobat team members such as Rick Brown and Sarah Rosenbaum -- reporting to ex-CEO Bruce Chizen -- who together presided over a golden era for Acrobat that saw the software segmented into several editions including Elements, Standard, and Pro; began the standards push toward PDF/X for prepress and PDF/A for archiving; and hardwired features into the Pro version that focused attention back on the creative and design community after several years of establishing the product's beachhead in the enterprise world.

Another group for whom Adobe tailored a raft of specialized features in Acrobat during Vitelli's time was engineers and their clients, which he says "turned out to be a dramatic growth area for us." Not only did Adobe address document security to facilitate sharing of drawings and bids, but it also built measuring tools and adjustable scales for engineers to help communicate their designs.

That's continuing now, he says. While Adobe can--and will--cater to the general office worker with Acrobat, he feels that the work the company's doing to build in features for specific industries will expand Acrobat's reach.

"[In general] Adobe continues to do a good job of carving off product capabilities that are important to specific market segments," Vitelli says. "They continue to do great work on the whole engineering segment--doing more stuff with 3D inside a PDF; more stuff with the creative pro market; and legal. I think the work they're doing working with these really large verticals are what they need to do to grow their user base."