Opinion: Big Blue could possibly dent Adobe Acrobat and LiveCycle forms technology—and it will be a hot topic for debate at this fall's PDF Conference—but don't toss your copy of Acrobat in the trash quite yet.Earlier this week, IBM announced it plans to acquire forms software company PureEdge Solutions.
Hmmm, Big Blue in the forms space, where Adobe has made considerable investments—and a considerable splash in the government, enterprise, and education sectors, judging from the list of large deals company president Shantanu Narayen ticks off in each successive quarterly conference call with financial analysts.
Competing with IBM is Adobe LiveCycle forms technology's second problem—the first happened a couple years back, when Microsoft announced InfoPath. So far, InfoPath has been a no-show, but you can bet Microsoft patiently continues to build a user base on the fledgling technology.
Now IBM has scooped up a company whose software, coupled with IBM back-end products—if implemented well—will make data collection and analysis a user-friendly process for both the workflow designer and end-user.
Does that mean the sky is falling for PDF, and all the government and corporate clients who bought into LiveCycle forms server technology will suddenly divest of Adobe and bet their chips on the new IBM system? Will garbage collectors across America suddenly be heaving into their trucks piles of Acrobat boxes stacked on the sidewalk with the kitchen trash?
Is Microsoft gunning for Adobe? Click here to read David Coursey's view.
We posed that question to Carl Young, who has staked a piece of his career to forms, as a software educator and PDF Conference trade show organizer. If anyone has to get in front of the curve and integrate IBM's forms technology into his or her game plan, Young will be one of the first. His short answer: Don't trash Acrobat or LiveCycle quite yet.
"I don't know [if IBM's going to shake things up]," Young said" … To me, it's a big world and there a lot of business processes. I don't see why there isn't room for everybody's solution out there. It's almost an unlimited market—it's almost every business process."
Watching the market since Acrobat added forms capability in its 3.5 plug-in update back around 1998, Young has observed that most forms implementations happen in one of two ways: One, the person in an organization charged with handling paper forms (and keying the data therein) gets fed up and spearheads the automation of e-forms that plug into the organization's back-end databases or wherever the forms data needs to go; two, management higher-ups decide to make forms a part of a giant system in which the forms comprise one cog in the machine.
"It seems to me Acrobat's been really successful with people who are actually in the workflow implementing the process, and moving up," Young says, adding that PDF also seems to work quite well in applications where a large entity such as a multinational bank, the IRS, or an insurance company might serve forms to millions of consumers. The free Reader's presence on almost every computer desktop helps simplify forms deployment in these situations.
Next Page: Integrated processes could give IBM or Microsoft an opening.
Where the IBMs and Microsofts of the world could find traction for their forms solutions, Young suggests, is when a forms process gets tightly integrated with several applications at once, and it stays within the firewall.
Take, for example, when a company requires all of its purchase orders to be filled out the same way, Young says: "How they look when they get delivered doesn't matter. What you're really looking for is that the person has the right to make the request, you haven't exceeded spending limits, you're going to the appropriate vendors—all that stuff that takes lots of server interactions to validate."
In the end, the usual factors weigh in Adobe's favor: The billion Reader downloads scattered to the ends of the earth; the giant lead Adobe has built in the forms workflow space despite the size of its competitors IBM and Microsoft; and of course, the billions of dollars and countless hours customers have spent building forms infrastructures around Adobe and PDF.
That's not to minimize IBM's move into the PDF forms turf. It just puts it into perspective.
Young certainly will integrate discussion about IBM/PureEdge into the agenda for his fall PDF Conference September 26-27 at the Crystal City Hilton in Washington, D.C. Right now, the conference still is evolving: Last week he added a free, Adobe-sponsored preconference seminar (limited seating, it's available to preregistered attendees only) in which expert Leonard Rosenthol will wax poetic about topics such as the PDF file spec, document automation from the server side, and of course, forms.
Click here to read about a plug-in that enables Javascript novices to add custom dialog boxes to PDFs.
Invariably, PDF Conference attendees—some of whom will be making forms software purchases for whole government agencies, this particular show tends to be thick with people like that—will be asking vendors and speakers about IBM, PureEdge, and how IBM's move complicates their buying decisions.
As usual, the discussion of forms has a large presence in the seminars, Young says, along side other topics such as document workflow, implementing JavaScript into PDFs, prepress, and PDFs with federally mandated accessibility features for users with visual disabilities.
Before the IBM announcement, Young had set up a panel of vendors and industry veterans—none from Adobe—to discuss technology trends that touch Acrobat and PDF.
"We were going to talk about what they see happening as a part of the Adobe-Macromedia merger, and then we were going to talk about Microsoft [InfoPath] and Adobe," Young says. "Now I guess I'm going to have to add IBM."
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