The company plans to incorporate SchemaSoft's data extraction and conversion components into future products.Apple confirmed today that it has purchased SchemaSoft, a Canadian-based company that specializes in developing software components that convert data between different formats.
"Apple has acquired assets from SchemaSoft, a developer of software components for facilitating digital information workflow," the comment reads, in part. Currently, Apple Computer Inc.'s only comment to Ziff Davis Internet News is to confirm the purchase and say that the technology it has acquired will be used in future products—although it didn't say for what.
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This move caught some partners of Schema Software Inc. a bit off guard. "Considering I just heard about this yesterday, I'm not sure just yet how this will affect us," said Kevin Brown, vice president of sales and marketing for RenderX Inc., a company that helps businesses move XML content into high-quality printable format.
"I think this is a great move by Apple. SchemaSoft does some great translation for all different kinds of formats. They converted data [as a partner to RenderX] so that we could get it into our engine [XEP]," Brown said.
SchemaSoft's workflow mantra for the digital age is "extract, synthesize and publish," according to its Web site. SchemaSoft's products can extract data formats found in software products such as Microsoft Office and Visio, along with Adobe Acrobat, Illustrator and InDesign. The tools can also output into those formats as well as into HTML and XML.
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The iWork suite offers some of these tools, as does Microsoft Office, including the Keynote presentation program, which can read and write to Microsoft Corp.'s PowerPoint format, and Pages, a word processing program.
Apple is already a customer of SchemaSoft, according to the Canadian company's Web site.
SchemaSoft has about 40 workers, also according to its Web site. Attempts to reach the company for comment were unsuccessful, as the phone number given goes directly to voicemail, and an email to Dr. Philip Mansfield, president of the company, was returned as undeliverable.
Document Management 
