Adobe’s Narayen sees growth in video, mobile
Interview: Adobe’s president discusses the importance of providing developers with tools that work across several platforms
Source: InfoWorld
Written by Elizabeth Heichler, IDG News Service
With its acquisition of Macromedia in late 2005, Adobe Systems won control of the Flash technology that has become a nearly ubiquitous way of authoring and viewing interactive and multimedia content on the Web. Now, the 25-year-old software company with deep roots in creative applications and an iron grip on electronic documents thanks to its de facto-standard PDF document format, has its eye on development and content presentation across all sorts of platforms and devices.
President and COO Shantanu Narayen recently sat down with a group of IDG journalists to talk about the opportunities that mobile platforms and digital video present for Adobe. Joined by David Mendels, senior vice president of the enterprise and developer solutions business unit, Narayen also described the company’s hopes for its multiplatform runtime environment, code-named Apollo, that is designed to run Web applications using Flash, Flex, HTML, JavaScript, Ajax, and PDF and is due for public beta release later this year.
IDG: What are the key areas of growth for Adobe?
Narayen: Clearly, the creative customer is still a very important customer to us, and there what we’re trying to do is enable them to create content across print and the Web, but also increasingly video and wireless. We’re seeing a tremendous explosion of digital video, which we think is a huge growth area for us. And also wireless because creating content for wireless devices is very hard. So in the next version of our Creative Suite applications, we’re going to be looking to dramatically expand how we can help people create content. This year, we’re going to be releasing Creative Suite 3, which will be the first generation of applications that combines products like Photoshop and Illustrator from Adobe and Dreamweaver and Flash from Macromedia.
We think Apollo is going to enable a new generation of applications that combines the power of the desktop as well as the interactivity and connectedness of the Internet.