The Hindu Business Line : Adobe bullish on e-gov applications

The Business Development Manager for Adobe in India, Mr S. Angiah, told Business Line that globally there are about 675 million Acrobat Reader downloads and millions of PDF (portable document format) users in public domain.

The Indian Government and its departments try to bridge the digital divide, there are challenges of standardisation of solutions, particularly documentation and archiving and retrieval.

"As a technology partner, we are in the process of helping various Government agencies to standardise and make the work environment more people-friendly. We are working with systems integrators such as Wipro and TCS to build solutions around Acrobat for the Government sector,'' he said.

Adobe's presence in the creative segment is through Acrobat in various e-governance initiatives of both the Central and several State governments.

For instance, the Election Commission of India is using Adobe Acrobat to collate, share and use data in the PDF format. Census India for the first time issued its data in the electronic format.

The entire data was made public in Adobe PDF format. So much so that in the manual of Census India, it has been mentioned that all the electronic data to be provided should be in the Adobe PDF.

Engineers India Ltd was effectively using Adobe Acrobat to share engineering designs with its partners in India and abroad in Adobe PDF format. BHEL is another case in point.

Apart from the marketing and business development arm in India, Adobe has an R&D centre based in Noida where about 300 researchers are working on various products and solutions. The Indian R&D arm is credited to have developed the Pagemaker.