Adobe targets enterprise collaboration market

Adobe's recent acquisition of Antepo marks the first stage in the firm's strategy to break into an enterprise collaboration market dominated by IBM and Microsoft, analysts have predicted.

Gartner expects that Adobe will begin to integrate Antepo's enterprise IM with presence technology into its Acrobat software including Acrobat Professional and Acrobat Connect.

"Adobe intends to offer a collaboration suite, adding IM and presence capabilities to its portfolio through the Antepo acquisition," said a Gartner briefing.

"With Antepo, Adobe gains a presence engine which could potentially be tied to IP telephony infrastructure, and which federates with multiple IM networks and runs on Windows and Linux."

Although Adobe's strength has been in the authoring and publishing tools market, enterprise-level collaboration will require a more direct and focused sales effort, according to Gartner.

"Adobe's acquisition of Macromedia resulted in rebranding Breeze (Macromedia's web conferencing product) to Adobe Acrobat Connect, and brought the first wave of real-time collaboration capabilities to integrate into its document-centric collaboration strategy," the report said.

The analyst noted that this 'buy versus build' approach of gaining collaboration components could move Adobe more quickly into the enterprise market.

"Adobe plans to embed IM and presence capabilities into its product line, particularly in Acrobat, and ultimately create links to Microsoft and IBM via Antepo's dual protocol (XMPP and Sip/Simple) IM and presence platform," the report stated.

"Extending multiple points of presence into its document-centric collaborati on framework will enable Adobe to support contextual collaboration capabilities regardless of the enterprise infrastructure.

"Presence information from team members could be surfaced in a shared document context with the ability to launch a web meeting."

However, Gartner warned that Adobe faces the challenge of finding a niche in a collaboration market dominated by incumbents including Microsoft and IBM.

"Adobe will have to integrate Antepo technology into the Acrobat framework and maintain support for Antepo customers," the report said.

"Adobe must also continue to improve its enterprise focus in sales and marketing efforts outside its traditional creative-professionals customer base. "