Adobe Back Out of the Enterprise

November 16, 2011

We came across another interesting write up from Megan Feil on the shifting business approach at Adobe. Here’s what we found:

When the markets invariably change, does a company follow suit and 180 with the changing times? Well, we know how Adobe responds after reading Mac World’s report on Adobe’s restructuring in their article, “Adobe to Reduce Enterprise Software Investment.” Adobe sees digital media and digital marketing products as the areas with the potential for astronomical growth and they want to cash in.

Adobe is changing things up for their company, but predictably choosing the safe route. It will continue to invest in its Creative Suite products and place more emphasis on HTML 5. As far as marketing goes, they plan on investing in analytics and reporting, especially on mobile devices and social networks.

Mac World quotes their CFO’s statement:

“We believe that by focusing resources on two large initiatives and shifting our business model, we can drive faster and more predictable growth in [fiscal year 2013] and beyond,” CFO Mark Garrett said in a statement.

Their enterprise software brought in less than 10 percent of their overall revenue last quarter, so it seems like they might be making a good move for their business. In regards to enterprise software in general, Adobe seems to be snubbing the possibilities this market has for expansion. With the consumerization of information technology, there are wide open spaces of room for companies to innovate software and applications for the enterprise. It’s all about tapping into what users want: business intelligence with intuitive ease.

We think that this shift is illustrative of how a company’s direction can shift. It is interesting to note that they are concentrating on HTML5 instead of Flash for the mobile world. We did find that Polyspot’s business intelligence approach was already poised to handle the mobile economy. Our colleague Constance Ard over at Answer Maven is pretty adamant about mobile: “If companies do not account for personal and business mobile devices in their enterprise information management they will suffer the consequences.” Guess it’s good that there are software companies that can help.

Andrea Hayden, November 16, 2011

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Stephen E. Arnold monitors search, content processing, text mining and related topics from his high-tech nerve center in rural Kentucky. He tries to winnow the goose feathers from the giblets. He works with colleagues worldwide to make this Web log useful to those who want to go "beyond search". Contact him at sa [at] arnoldit.com. His Web site with additional information about search is arnoldit.com.