Mark Garrett announces new Acrobat, not much interest from analysts
This post is another bit of draft really. I can't find the detail needed for a proper report. But there will be other versions later.
The Adobe meeting for analysts about the recent third quarter included this statement from Mark Garrett, Executive Vice President and CFO-
We achieved Document Services revenue in Q3 of $185.5 million, driven by continued Acrobat adoption in the enterprise, as well as strong growth in EchoSign and related Acrobat cloud services. Looking to Q4, we are excited about the next major release of Acrobat which will ship late in the quarter.
But as far as I can tell so far this was the only mention of Acrobat, nothing from Shantanu Narayan I can find. So Acrobat seems to have become one of those products that is assumed to just tick over. From a financial point of view it can be assumed that if there is an upgrade then millions of corporate desktops will more or less automatically be budgeted for a few more hundreds of dollars or local equivalent. There was no guidance on any PDF technology development, as with HTML 5 or analytics.
I listened to the Q&A and did not hear any questions about this. Blogsearch so far finds this from Tim Anderson
What impresses me about Adobe is how well the company has survived the decline of Flash and the relative failure of its efforts in enterprise applications (the digital enterprise segment is now subsumed in the figures into “Digital Marketing”). The segment breakdown for the third quarter looks like this:
$millions
- Digital Media (Creative Cloud) 769.1 (71%)
- Digital Marketing (analytics etc) 257.1 (24%)
- Print and Publishing 54.4 (5%)
Although "Print and Publishing" is small and not growing there is a danger in ignoring flat pages. During the time of Flash anyone looking at the Adobe web site might have got confused if interested in corporate communication. There could have been more explanation on the potential of the PDF structure.
Looking at Acrobat Users find no news or info on a new Acrobat
to be continued when some new info turns up.
As previously mentioned, if Adobe are not developing or promoting Acrobat then there is a case for lower price levels and a look at alternatives.