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Adobe may set up development facility in India

Regional Manager, South Asia, Howard Digby, has said that due diligence studies are being carried out for outsourcing development. It is getting tough to get professionals in the Silicon Valley and people are always on the move, he said.

In India, the company is considering both Bangalore and Delhi. A final decision is expected to be made by the end of the year, he said.

The $760-million company is present in India through Wipro, its distributor. The Indian market accounts for less than 1 per cent of the company's turnover. Adobe hopes to bring this up. It plans to go in for massive advertising and promotional efforts with the help of Wipro.

A representative office may also be set up in India, he said. Apart from the development centre, marketing people are expected to be stationed in India to support the distributors and dealers.

Adobe, which is perhaps the only company in the niche area of visual solutions, caters to graphics professionals. It is trying to increase its reach and capture the higher end of the enterprise/business market. Its products run on both the Macs as well as Windows platforms.

While worldwide, most Adobe software sits on Macs, in India, 65 per cent of it is on Windows. This is partly because of the lower penetration of Macs in India.

In India, PageMaker has been its most popular package. However, piracy in India is worrying the company. Digby called upon the government to include software audit as part of the financial audit to check piracy.

Piracy is unfair to the genuine users of software and prevents the company from bringing prices down, he pointed out.

The company's distributors and dealers could be urged to boycott suppliers who are pirates, he said, specially, ad agencies, which are notorious users of pirated Adobe software.

Adobe, whose basic graphics technology helps provide rich content, is also looking at the Internet market. It has products for Web content creation, including the PDF (portable document format), with embedded links.

Its PageMill software creates Web pages much easier. Adobe Acrobat Capture scans pages and converts them into PDF files. The US Government and major financial institutions have been using this to convert reports, manuals and paper documents to the electronic media.

- Compiled from the Indian media

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