Last week, I was invited to attend Adobe’s EMEA analyst event, which was focused on clarifying Adobe’s strategy for addressing the enterprise market in the region. Given my position as a collaboration software analyst, I was particularly interested to find out about Adobe’s plans for raising the profile of its slick web conferencing solution, Connect Pro. However, I was frankly disappointed. While classified by Adobe as an “Enterprise” product, all the marketing and partner-focused strategy that was described during the event related to its other “Enterprise” offering, LiveCycle. Where Connect – or the term “collaboration” – appeared, it was positioned largely as an add-on capability to the broader LiveCycle offering, rather than a solution in its own right.
In fact, Connect Pro sits rather awkwardly in Adobe’s overall portfolio. While the legacy Acrobat products also offer some collaborative components, Adobe seems to struggle with how to address the collaboration market opportunity. Little real progress has been made since it acquired the Connect Pro technology (then called Macromedia Breeze), with its customer base still dominated by elearning activities, and despite having technology which competes well from a functional perspective with vendors such as Cisco Webex, Microsoft and IBM (and a much slicker interface), it remains relatively unknown in this market.
For several years now, the company has been looking for ways to penetrate the enterprise market beyond the sale of packaged, shrink-wrapped products, which offer little opportunity for growth and upsell within the existing customer base. While with LiveCycle – its BPM solution which combines products from its Accelio and Macromedia acquisitions – Adobe has created a rounded solution combining its rich internet applications (RIA) expertise with its BPM technology and is developing a convincing strategy for addressing that market, Connect Pro remains a niche, and rather distinct product in the overall portfolio. Part of the problem is that its collaboration offering is limited to web conferencing – it has no messaging or presence capabilities beyond the context of a meeting, for example, and the additional collaborative capabilities provided by its SaaS-based offering Acrobat.com (such as collaborative editing and document sharing) are not targeted at the same market (and hence not integrated with Connect Pro).
It’s got to the point where it is decision time for Adobe now – does it want to be a collaboration software player, or not? While there is clearly some work to be done on how to position itself and grow its solution, Adobe has some great technology in this area, if only it was visible. However, at the moment it is in danger of forgetting this asset in the excitement of the LiveCycle momentum. I’d like to see Adobe do well here, but for now, there’s no real evidence of how this is likely to happen.
You can read our assessment of Adobe’s collaboration software offering here.
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Tags: Industry news
