Tech Watch | InfoWorld Staff » Adobe's Creative Suite is just the tip of the iceberg

March 29, 2005 | Comments: (0)

Adobe's Creative Suite is just the tip of the iceberg

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According to reports circulating on the Web this week, Adobe Systems next month plans to update its Creative Suite package of graphics software that includes the popular Photoshop and Illustrator applications.

In an interview on Tuesday at InfoWorld's offices, Adobe President and COO Shantanu Narayen said that while the company is best known for its Creative Suite and digital imaging product lines, Adobe is aggressively pursuing a larger vision of enterprise document services.

According to the IDG News Service, a press release detailing the new Creative Suite products was inadvertently posted to Adobe's Web site over the weekend. The posted statement said Creative Suite 2 will be announced April 4, and will include the Photoshop CS2 application, which will ship in May. New features in Photoshop CS2 include improved support for working with "raw" digital camera images, according to IDG News service.

Narayen was reluctant to confirm the Creative Suite reports, but he did acknowledge that product updates are in the pipeline.

"There are rumors to that effect. We are not announcing any new products today but we will be making an announcement shortly about the Creative Suite," he said.

Over the past five years, Adobe has diversified its product lines, Narayen said.

"What people know us best for is what we've done with the creative professional customer. That business continues to grow, [but] our largest business opportunity and where the growth is now is in our intelligent documents business," he said.

The business automation trend hasn't completely left documents behind, Narayen explained.

"The amount of information being shared is increasing. Documents are still is where that currency is represented and where the information resides," he said.

Adobe is focusing on the new category of document services that can help enterprises bridge the gap between what knowledge workers are using on the front end and what enterprises are using to automate their back end, according to Narayen.

"We are looking at the lifecycle of a document, how it is generated all the way to archiving for Sarbanes-Oxley and [other] reasons," Narayen said.

The company envisions an entire platform spanning desktop offerings to servers.

The necessary parts to this platform are a universal reader, an intelligent document, and related document services, which address specific business problems such as compliance reporting or cost reduction efforts, Narayen said.

Adobe already has a lineup of products addressing these areas, such as its Acrobat line and enterprise server offerings, and will announce new products this year addressing the document lifecycle issue, according to Narayen.

Posted by Cathleen Moore on March 29, 2005 04:46 PM

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