Acrobat marketing exec Pam Deziel says Adobe is striving toward making PDFs more secure, at making workflows more efficient, and at achieving compliance with government mandates now that the format has become a standard for electronic documents.ORLANDO, Fla.—The bleary-eyed crowd here at Wednesday's 8 a.m.
AGI PDF & Acrobat 2005 Conference keynote address probably were waiting for the usual gee-whiz demonstration of new features in Acrobat—considering this was the first major PDF-centric show on the calendar since the
release of Acrobat 7 in January.
But Adobe Systems Inc.'s Director of Acrobat Marketing Pam Deziel took a hard left turn from the usual, instead pulling back the curtain and giving attendees a rare peek at the Intelligent Document team's goals and strategy.
She also hinted at what might be coming in the future for Acrobat and PDF as Adobe strives toward making PDFs more secure, at making their workflows more efficient, and at achieving compliance with governmental mandates now that the format has become a standard for electronic documents.
The end result of their labors, company officials hope, is that Acrobat becomes the hub between people, processes and policies as they commit business-critical information to the PDF format.
Deziel framed such abstract ideas with concrete statistics, another departure from the typical Adobe party line.
The average enterprise generates 300,000 business-critical documents a month, she said, and promptly loses track of about 25 percent of those. Acrobat and LiveCycle products are designed to help businesses address this problem, where "people are the middleware," shifting information around in the course of doing their jobs.
Another surprising statistic? Some 70 percent of Acrobat seats are now sold to businesses through Adobe's licensing division—not the traditional shrink-wrapped boxes most people associate with Adobe applications.
"That's relatively new for our business," Deziel said, and it poses a challenge to Adobe when it comes to enabling IT departments to manage their licenses in a manner far different from the customary Adobe model of one designer, one copy of Photoshop. "Pfizer is not running around to all 75,000 desktops and installing Acrobat from CDs."
With a bevy of vertical markets ripe for Acrobat—legal, financial and insurance, to name a few—Deziel offered insight as to why Adobe hard-wired so many features into Acrobat 6 and 7 for the direct benefit of the architectural/engineering/construction vertical.
"The reason we picked that was because they look a lot like our graphic arts customers," Deziel said, referring to such businesses' size—typically, fewer than 100 employees—and workflow. "An architect is basically a designer. They're using Illustrator, InDesign, the Creative Suite. … In fact, when we went out to do market research in this segment, we said, 'Let's go out and get some prospects [for our research groups].' Some non-users. And we couldn't find any non-users among architects in the San Francisco area."
Another question some PDF hawks in the audience voiced: Acrobat 7 Pro activates special features in Reader 7 that allow for reviewing and commenting. Just because they build it, however, doesn't mean they will come.
Has there been an uptick in enthusiasm for Reader 7?
Indeed there has, if the pace of downloads is an indicator: In the first two months of availability, Adobe recorded 17 million downloads of Reader 7, which represents 40 percent faster uptake than recorded for Version 6.
"I expect that to go up by about double now that Linux [Reader] is available," Deziel said.
A question posed from an attendee on the floor—one that Deziel added "gets asked in the Adobe lunchroom pretty frequently," and by probably everyone who ever wanted to use Reader for more than just passively consuming a document and tossing it aside: Will Adobe ever allow the saving of PDFs in Reader?
"I can say with some fair amount of confidence that at some point we will," said Deziel. "Exactly when and exactly to what extent, that's a little difficult to predict. But it might be sooner than you might imagine."
Deziel closed with a report card of sorts, outlining things she said Adobe had succeeded in accomplishing and offered a few insights on what Adobe recognizes as needing more work and to which the company plans to devote more resources:
- Helping push PDF/E's fast-track adaptation by ISO as an electronic document standard for the exchange of engineering data.
- Supporting the developer ecosystem surrounding PDF. "We have not, frankly, done as good a job [of that] as I think we could," Deziel said. "We're beginning to recognize that and put more in place around that."
- Although Deziel didn't offer much detail, she said that Adobe will in the future provide "real enterprise support" for Acrobat desktop products.
"Acrobat, in June, will be just 12 years old," Deziel said. "We're really just an adolescent in terms of where we've come and where we have yet to go."
Expressed with statistics, that means that Adobe has sold about 20 million Acrobat seats since Day One, but Deziel said the company estimates that, through the efforts outlined above, there's potential for 100 million.
Document Management 
