Active Adobe

Naresh Gupta

In conversation Having achieved global revenue of $649.4 million in the first quarter of 2007, Adobe Systems is hoping to ride a new high in India. Its business plans, include building new campuses, adding capacities at its Noida and Bangalore centres and a renewed focus on developing mobile applications for the Indian cellphone market. Naresh Gupta, senior vice-president (print and classic publishing group) and managing director (India-R&D), Adobe Systems, talks to Priyanka Joshi

Adobe India seems to have emerged as the R&D support system for its parent business unit in San Jose, California. Going forward in 2007, will Indian R&D support be beefed up?

Our CEO, Bruce Chizen, had promised an investment of $200 million in India. So, beginning this year, we would be investing $100 million in acquiring land and expanding our Noida and Bangalore campuses.

We have already spent last eight months talking to authorities for a five-acre land in Noida, and similar space in Bangalore, and hope to have new campuses ready in the next 12-15 months.

At present, Noida and Bangalore offices have an overall capacity to seat 1,200 people and with new campuses, we hope to reach a capacity of around 2,000 people by the end of this year. We also nurture the hope that soon our R&D centres in Noida and Bangalore will develop products from India and for India.

Incidentally, India is not really an attractive market for selling products. Owing to piracy, we earn only a dollar for every $10 spent which makes for a staggering loss of 90 per cent for any company to absorb.

How will the infrastructure that you are putting up in India help you lead the way in the markets?

The kind of work we do from India is very critical to our bottomline. Adobe has filed in excess of 50 patents from India. We have also contributed to larger international projects, developed products out of India and now begun work for the mobile market in India based on flash technologies.

E-learning is a promising business area for Adobe and we have partnerships with e-learning players like NIIT, developers and trainers to help create rich content, add interactivity, simulations, games to the study material.

Technical documentation is yet another area where Adobe is helping with web content applications and publishing tools.

Last year, Adobe India grew by 50 per cent and we plan to keep growing by renewing our capacities. Adobe in India has 1,000 people, which is around 30 per cent of Adobe's engineering workforce or one sixth of Adobe workforce. This clearly tells our commitment to carve Indian business unit as an asset.

Do you see expanding applications for portable devices, like cellular phones and handheld games, that integrate flash technology being a big part of Adobe India's forward strategy?

The only way to sell in India, today, is to get into mobiles. We have a young mobile and device team in Bangalore (which will be 50 people strong by year-end), that focuses on delivering solutions for mobiles. We will develop tools focused on Flash and PDF-based solutions to create compelling experiences on any non-PC device with a screen.

In the US, China and Japan, Adobe has been very active in the mobile space and we will be replicating the platform and business model in India too. In our latest results, mobile business has contributed about $13 million to the revenues.

The Indian Acrobat team is already developing Acrobat Reader for several platforms including Linux, Solaris, Pocket PC, Palm Pilot, Nokia Camera Phone and several more consumer devices.