A conversation with Raman Nagpal, Director of Adobe’s Print and Scan Business

More than a year after the Adobe/FedEx Kinko’s uproar and with some organizational restructuring at Adobe toward year’s end, WhatTheyThink was interested to see what the company is up to relative to its support of the printing industry.  Imagine our surprise when we were connected with some folks in India to learn more!

WTT:  Raman, with the departure from Adobe of people like Robin Tobin and Lonn Lorenz, who have been very visible in their support of the printing industry, we were wondering what Adobe is up to relative to its strategies and ongoing support of the industry.

RN:  In the Print and Scan business, we are focused on the printing industry. Lonn and Robin were printing industry contacts from the Creative Suite business, while our group focuses on the core business of PostScript, PDF and the Adobe PDF Print Engine (APPE).  Our business is an OEM model, and we are the support organization for OEMs worldwide, not limited to any particular geography.  We have engineering teams working out of San Jose, and knowledge workers in the UK, Tokyo and India.  Adobe is still focused on, and cares very much about, the printing industry.  Over the last few years, we have made, and continue to make, significant investments in printing technology.  This has manifested itself in a richer portfolio of technology than ever before. Although we have some direct contact with print service providers, our primary relationship is with OEMs.  Those touch points with print service providers are important because they give us great insight into problems we might be able to solve with our technology.

WTT:  Tell us a little about yourself.

RN:  I oversee business development, product management and engineering for Adobe PostScript, Adobe PDF Print Engine and Adobe PDF Scan Library. My organization serves Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs), as I said, as well as Independent Software Vendors (ISVs.) Prior to joining Adobe, I worked in diverse fields ranging from wireless protocol stacks and mobile devices, to eLearning and storage area networks.  What keeps me motivated is applying emerging technologies in non-obvious ways to solve business and social problems.

WTT:  Does Adobe still have the ASN print service provider program?

RN:  Yes, very much so.  It is part of the Creative Suite group.

WTT:  I am wondering how your business outlook is with the current economic situation.

RN:  Everyone knows what is happening in the economy, and it is anybody’s guess how bad it will get form here.  One of the key challenges for the printing industry, even in the good old times, was slower growth than GDP.  We are not exactly in an exploding market scenario.  My business is strongly correlated to print engine sales.  For those suppliers to the industry, supplies and service will move at a slower pace, but the equipment sales will obviously slow down as big ticket procurement declines.  Since we are so tied to the equipment sales, it is sort of a double whammy for us; we are more badly impacted than our customers, which is an interesting situation for us. At the same time, the huge investments we have made in our portfolio are starting to show results.  In the last couple of years, we have gained very significant market share in the key areas we were targeting.

WTT:  Can you give us a couple of examples?

RN:  We are very committed to establishing PDF as the currency of exchange for both file sharing and printing.  We are also working toward making PDF-VT an ISO standard to consolidate the extremely fragmented VDP marketplace.

WTT:  I was going to ask you about PDF-VT.  After hearing a lot about it around the drupa timeframe, I haven’t really heard that much lately.

RN:  We believed it was important to have this ratified as an ISO standard, and these things take time.  That being said, we have had a lot of traction and we expect it to be ratified as a standard in late 2009 or early 2010, although this could still move.

WTT:  Why do you believe PDF-VT is important?

RN:  There are two or three parts of the ecosystem that will benefit from this standard. On the creation side, you need all VDP application vendors to be able to produce PDF-VT in a manner that is optimized for consumption. We have been making progress with these vendors, and we believe 80-90% of the players that count in this creation market have made the necessary changes and optimizations in their applications to support PDF VT. But since it is still not a standard that is published, they will not formally launch support until the standard is published.  Their internal efforts to support it are well underway, so once the standard is ratified, we should see PDF-VT products come to the market quickly.

WTT:  What about APPE?

RN:  APPE is gaining ground, and has seen wide adoption from all of our existing customers. We have also had several new OEMs who are reviewing the technology, and we expect to see them adopt.  These are exciting times for us. They are challenging, but we have continued to invest and will emerge much stronger than the competition over the next couple of years.

WTT:  Do you see Microsoft’s XPS as one of those competitors?

RN:  We have looked at XPS a number of times in the past.  Our own sense is that while XPS is a decent PDL to represent documents and to be able to print them, we haven’t seen that much traction over the last couple years when we talk to our customers.  With the kind of established workflows and printing capabilities our partners and their customers have, we continue to see wholehearted support for PDF.  Personally, I haven’t seen that many sound bytes from Microsoft around XPS as there were a couple of years ago.  I am not very clear on whether Microsoft has repositioned it or rethought their strategy.  Things could change; XPS could become more prominent, but today we don’t see that happening and feel confident that our PDF VT strategy is the strategy for the market. There are enough tools available to print service providers from both Adobe’s stable and other vendors that allow them to consume XPS jobs.  Adobe offers a technology that allows a job to be converted into PostScript from many formats, including XPS.

WTT:  Speaking of PostScript, it appeared that Adobe was taking focus off of PostScript in favor of PDF, perhaps with an end-of-life strategy.  Can you comment on that?

RN:  I think it would be unwise for anyone in the industry to assume that PostScript will be gone.  This isn’t exactly a fast-moving market. VDP is the new hot thing and has been for several years, but it can take a while to make dramatic changes in this industry. Clearly, we have a rich and strong history and legacy of inventing and proliferating Postscript technology, and it remains a significant part of our print portfolio.  We remain committed to supporting PostScript. What has happened over the years is that there has been a distinct shift, especially on the workflow and submission side, to PDF. PDF is the preferred way of submitting professional quality jobs, but a lot of it does get converted to PostScript at print time.  APPE, for the first time, gave the back end of the workflow the ability to leverage exactly the same PDF rendering technology available to creator or previewer and that is a huge benefit.  Does that mean PostScript is something we would no longer support?  Absolutely not.  As a language, however, PostScript is not evolving.  We continue to enhance its implementation, but there are certain limitations that you cannot fix with workarounds, like the way it handles color in a proprietary rather than open manner.  APPE addresses that.  But again, we have no intention whatsoever to do away with support for PostScript. We will continue to support it as long as our customers need it.

WTT:  What are some of the new developments we can expect to see from Adobe?

RN:  We are working on many things to make it easier for our print service provider friends.  I will avoid getting into specific details related to product release plans, but in generic terms, even while some of us like to look upon this market as monolithic, it is not. There are distinct segments, and each has its own fairly unique needs with respect to the workflow.  Is it a hand off, or a more casual file/print paradigm?  As we have empowered better PDF workflows, that solves to a large extent the submission problem, aligning the creation and production sides of the equation.  We also realize that APPE’s attractiveness is not limited to the production segment.  We will get it into more office and enterprise segments where people are not as familiar with the proper handoff workflow, but rather, more with file and forget.  So there is much to be done with PDF on the submission side.  Also, native PDF editing in the office and enterprise is difficult.  You will see in the near future some interesting progress that we will announce along those lines. How do we get the creative users or Microsoft Office users to make sense of high quality printing with those department-level printers? We want to enable the creator of the job to be 100% confident of the output regardless of what type of printer they are targeting. We are working closely with our colleagues in the Creative Suite side in this regard.

WTT:  Can you comment on the number of APPE-enabled systems that are installed?

RN:  I have a counter on my desktop that keeps track of the number of systems shipped out so far. While I can’t reveal the exact number, it is in the thousands. It takes time to work through the OEM process, but installs are in the large thousands of numbers.

WTT:  What do you have on tap to help print service providers better address their customers’ multichannel communications needs?

RN:  There are several different aspects to that.  With Flash and PDF, penetration has reached of 90% of all screens in the world, including handhelds. That is a bigger reach in screens than anyone else in the world.  We are excited about doing new things with those technologies on the screen.  We have also been developing a number of prototypes that demonstrate how, by using rich Internet application (RIA) interfaces, we can improve the quality of the workflow.  Even in traditional prepress to press, you could do a lot of things using Flash, Flex or AIR.  You could set job options, stages of the workflow, review the document, and do dynamic operations using this technology.  There are a whole lot of things you can do with respect to the workflow, from creation through submission and printing.  Although it may be more relevant for office printing, a lot of printing is starting to happen from the Web.  Printing was not designed to handle dynamic web pages.  Are there ways to make that experience better?  Can we leverage our experience on the Web and with print technology to bring new solutions to printing, perhaps using handhelds or iPhones as a pointer to point to documents and you print to a printer located somewhere? Those are things we can do for printing that have not previous been easy to do.  We have a unique position and ability to bring together our knowledge of Web and mobile on the one hand and printing on the other.

WTT:  Raman, thank you.  Is there anything else you would like to add before we close?

RN:  We largely touched upon the areas I thought would be interesting to your readers.  I would recap by saying that in general, Adobe is a big company as you can imagine, and it is perhaps not visible to the outside world what is humming under the hood.  Because of the way we have messaged our focus on the cool things we are doing on Flash, Flex, AIR, etc., print service providers might get the sense we have forgotten them or don’t focus on them.  I want to take this opportunity to reiterate that if you look at what we have done in the last few years in the print business unit, the sheer number of technologies we offer compared to four years ago, you will see the evidence of our increased investment in this area.  We have also tried to become more nimble and flexible about how we do business with partners.  The results of those investments are starting to reap benefits.  Even though we don’t go out of our way to express our love and support for the printing industry, there is a lot happening.  People that have carefully monitored the announcements and the new customers we have acquired realize there is a much bigger focus on the print side than there was in the past.  I want to make sure the industry realizes that, and I am happy to have the opportunity to share our point of view, to discuss what we are doing, and to extend the word that we are there to support you and take our mutual businesses forward.