Southern California-based activePDF will announce a partnership with Australia's Nitro PDF Software tomorrow at the AIIM International Exposition and Conference in Boston. The deal gives users of activePDF's free PDF creator, PrimoPDF, an upgrade path to Nitro PDF, a low-cost alternative to Adobe Acrobat.

The companies did not disclose financial terms of the deal, but activePDF president and CEO Tim Sullivan says that revenue sharing is involved. He adds that, since Nitro's business centers around desktop apps and activePDF specializes in server software, activePDF is essentially giving Nitro PDF leads for desktop customers. In return, when those customers' PDF workflows scale up past what the desktop can handle, the Australians will hand them back over to activePDF.

"Our core competency is not selling desktop licenses; it's not what we do," Sullivan says. "[Nitro] has zero interest in the server market, so they're basically sending us all the server business."

The partnership will also cross-pollinate users of PrimoPDF with those of PDF Download, a free Nitro Firefox plug-in that turns PDFs into HTML files, among other functions.

The two companies' customers, when combined, include a majority of the Fortune 500 according to Nitro PDF Software CEO Sam Chandler. The two freeware products have about 20 million users, he adds.

"The market power we will have together is formidable," says Chandler. "We're talking about two of the biggest names in PDF, with two of the largest user bases. Together, we control the world's number-one free PDF creator [and] the number-one PDF extension for Firefox. . . . Nobody else in the space, other than Adobe, has a collective influence this great."

Sullivan says his company will announce PrimoPDF 4.0 this week, which includes a revamped user interface and features such as hooks into email programs. The most recent version, 3.2, came out last year.

activePDF launched PrimoPDF several years ago in the spirit of making PDF creation available to everyone for free, Sullivan says. The app is popular among Microsoft Publisher users, as well as governmental and educational entities that don't have the budget to spend on full-fledged Acrobat for everyone who creates PDF files at their sites.

Enough people use PrimoPDF that even Microsoft has taken notice. Microsoft's Application Compatibility group notified activePDF last October that PrimoPDF was part of the "test pack" for the new Windows platform to ensure that Windows 7's compatibility with previous releases.

Most PrimoPDF users find that they need more than simple file creation at some point, Sullivan says, whether it's splitting and merging PDF documents or other common document manipulation tasks done in Acrobat. For a time, activePDF tried to satisfy that upgrade need with its own apps, Symphony and Maestro, licensed from Global Graphics. Now, Sullivan's optimistic that he's found the sweet spot with Nitro as an upgrade path.

"We're not just a little ankle-biter anymore," Sullivan says. "We've been dealing with Sam and his group off and on for years. . . . Of all the competitors, they're probably the ones that are going to play the best in the sandbox."