Adobe has revealed it will be looking to expand into new markets in Africa with Adobe Acrobat X, which was rolled out this week.
Grant O'Connor, Adobe SA's newly appointed country manager, who has been with the software company for four months, claims there are many opportunities for the company to expand into the rest of Africa, particularly in the enterprise space that is often fraught with software piracy and document fraud.
“My mandate is to expand Adobe into Africa, particularly in SA, Nigeria, Angola, Kenya, Mauritius and Tanzania. Historically, Adobe's main focus has been on the creative side, which is where Adobe's strength lies; however, we're increasingly seeing demand for our software from enterprises,” says O'Connor.
He adds that the protection of information is a priority for banks and financial institutions, especially with the Protection of Personal Information Bill.
“Making sure that documents are authentic is becoming more relevant in today's world. The biggest trends in the market are around HTML5, which we see as a big growth opportunity for Adobe Flash. We're seeing vendors such as Song, LG and Samsung adopting to use Flash in their TV screens embedded with Internet capability”.
This week Adobe introduced the Adobe Acrobat X software suite that claims to empower business users to create dynamic content while collaborating across business environments.
According to IDC analyst, Melissa Webster, businesses demand a solution to work with their customers and partners in multiple time zones.
“Seamless, fluid content creation and collaboration is critical to how organisations use, repurpose and share information. It is no longer a 'nice to have' technology.”
According to Simon Bromfield, Adobe GM for Africa, Adobe has sold over 32 million units of Adobe Acrobat and the company currently controls a larger desktop software footprint than software giant Microsoft.
“The biggest trend we are seeing is that documents are becoming more dynamic. By 2013, more than 25% of the content that workers see in a day will be dominated by pictures, video and audio, according to Gartner. This is a market Adobe plans to capture.”
He adds: “Adobe Solutions' strategic direction is to increase the efficient exchange and collaboration of content and empower users to create engaging communications. We've also released solutions to simplify complex tasks and make it easier to protect information, expand document access and workflows.”
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