Cloud-focused R&D key to our success story in India: Adobe

Last year has been phenomenal for Adobe in the country and one of the key differentiators contributing to the success is the role played by Adobe India's R&D division that is creating top-of-the-line intellectual property, a top company executive has said.

The global software giant has a massive set-up in India, with over 5,200 employees spread across four campuses in Noida and Bengaluru, and its R&D labs claim a significant share of global innovations.

"Adobe's business in India has transformed tremendously in the last one year and we are seeing the growth trajectory go up across verticals including education, government, the Banking, Financial services and Insurance sector, and retail," Kulmeet Bawa, Managing Director for India and South Asia, Adobe, told IANS in an interview.

"We have secured sixth rank in 'Great Places to Work Surveys 2017' which is testimony to the rich employee experience we provide to our workforce. Going ahead, I am confident that our success story will only become stronger in India," Bawa added.

Adobe last month appointed Shanmugh Natarajan as Managing Director for Adobe Systems in the country.

"My role remains unchanged. I continue to lead Adobe's field operations in the region, which includes customer experience, growth and revenue," Bawa said.

"In tandem, Natarajan drives the company's innovation and R&D agenda out of India. With this, Adobe has a strong leadership bench to strategically drive its opportunity in India -- across business growth and R&D operations," Bawa explained.

Riding on its bouquet of offerings like Experience Cloud, Creative Cloud and Document Cloud, Adobe achieved a record quarterly revenue of $1.77 billion in the second quarter of 2017.

"As our business records strong growth globally as well as in India, leading the business opportunity for Adobe across South Asia has been a phenomenal experience for me. The India business continues to show robust momentum and is among Adobe's fastest-growing markets across APAC as well as globally," Bawa noted.

Adobe is investing in new-age tools like deep machine learning, artificial intelligence (AI) and virtual reality (VR) to enhance its product portfolio.

The company knows that it needs to leverage new forms of digital experiences like voice and gesture control which is critical for the brand.

"There are several players in the market that are going after artificial intelligence but as far as Adobe is concerned, we would rather play at the other extreme, wherein we would have a deeply domain specialised AI rather than a generalist AI tool," Bawa said.

Keeping this in mind, Adobe is taking the lead in leveraging new-age technologies across products and solutions.

"We are involved in domain specialised AI which is powered by 'Adobe Sensei', a unified AI and machine learning platform. 'Adobe Sensei' is driving innovation across all Adobe Clouds and empowering us to deliver great digital experiences to our customers," the executive told IANS.

In March this year, Adobe and Microsoft announced they would jointly work on AI to offer better products and provide customers more automated, intelligence-based experiences.

"Microsoft, unlike a lot of other announcements that we keep reading, was something very core to our strategy, very core to our heart and just to step back a little, there are three or four areas such as AI and 'Sensei' we wanted to focus on with this partnership," Bawa said.

From the India standpoint, there is a close synergy happening between Microsoft and Adobe.

"There are certain go-to-market actions that we have taken where both the teams are going in together with customers, specifically around the sales automation side," Bawa noted.

(Nishant Arora can be contacted at nishant.a@ians.in)

--IANS

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