Adobe may exceed its investment target for India

Naresh Gupta, senior vice-president (print and publishing) and managing director, Adobe India said: "India is one of the fastest growing markets for Adobe. We have already doubled our investments in sales and marketing over the last year. We might overshoot the $200 million (Rs 800 crore) investment target."

Gupta had said some time back that India was not an attractive market owing to piracy. However, that doesn't seem to be an issue anymore.

"Piracy may not go down in India overnight but any drop in the overall numbers means opportunity. While the Indian market is growing fast, large enterprises are also realising that managing piracy-related issues is cumbersome," he added. Thanks to piracy, the firm earns only a dollar for every $10 spent on its software, a staggering loss of 90 per cent.

Apart from expanding its India development centre, the company is also focussing on BRIC countries, eastern Europe and Japan for growth. The centres in China and Romania, says the firm, will be developed as premier development centres.

"Presently, the revenue contribution from emerging markets to Adobe is low in comparison with some of our competitors. Some of our peers are clocking 50 per cent growth from these markets. We can certainly aim for the same," said Gupta.

As for India, Adobe will continue to increase its base among the developer community through its Flash and AIR platforms. The company sees the next growth push coming from e-learning and technical documentation.

"India has a huge developer base and we want to be able to cater to them. We are actively working with system integrator (SI) partners and educational institutes to partner us," said Gupta.

As for e-learning and technical documentation, the company aims to grow upwards of market rate. "The e-learning market in India is growing at a rate of 23 per cent annually. Since the technical documentation solutions overlap with e-learning solutions, we expect to grow in the similar manner," added Gupta.

Mobile and online gaming is another growth area for the firm in India. To provide a consistent platform for a rich internet experience across television, personal computers, mobile devices, Adobe globally launched the Open Screen Project.

"For this, we have opened our Flash platform that ensures that people can add further value to it. Firms need not pay any licence or royalty fee to us to use this," said Gupta.

The initiative is being supported by Motorola, Nokia, NTT DoCoMo, Qualcomm, Samsung Electronics, Cisco, among others.