Adobe Is Expecting Big Things From Its New Acrobat Product

The next big release will be Acrobat 6, the latest version of Adobe's ubiquitous document-sharing software. Adobe announced its Acrobat 6 product family Monday. It includes a trio of products that will be available in late May. The upgrade to the core product, Acrobat Standard, will feature new capabilities around electronic forms, as well as document collaboration and work flow. Adobe also is adding two new flavors: Acrobat Elements and Acrobat Professional.

With Acrobat Elements, Adobe is going after an untapped market, says Keith Gay, an analyst with Thomas Weisel Partners.
"If you look at a typical 10,000-seat enterprise, (Adobe) might be selling 300 or 400 seats of Acrobat right now. But what they'd like to do is go after the other 98% of that enterprise and give the normal desktop user the ability to push a button and PDF something and do that at maybe a desktop price of, say, $20 to $30," he said.

Acrobat Professional will give engineering and creative professionals one-button PDF creation from specialized software such as Autodesk Inc.'s AutoCAD and Microsoft Corp.'s Visio.