Adobe bets on e-governance to drive growth in India

Thursday, 16 October 2003, 19:30 IST
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BANGALORE: US-based publishing software firm Adobe is developing its popular Acrobat reader in Hindi and other Indian languages in an attempt to grab a chunk of the "multi-million dollar" opportunity in the country's e-governance programmes. "E-governance will be the driver. In the short-term it (Government) represents a tens of millions of dollars opportunity," Adobe Sytstems Inc president and CEO Bruce Chizen told reporters in Bangalore on Wednesday on the sidelines of the Nasscom CEO forum where he addressed CEOs of IT firms. He said work on the Acrobat reader had begun at Adobe's R&D centre in Noida and the product in Hindi and another language would be rolled out in the next few months. "Opportunity is clearly the Government. We are yet clearly not established (in India) to determine how big is the opportunity beyond the Government," Chizen said, on India as a market even as he highlighted the rampant piracy of its products. "In my interaction with senior Government officials, it is clear that they want to automate their document processes," he said, on his interaction with IT ministry officials and Union IT minister Arun Shourie earlier this week at New Delhi. Engineers India Ltd, the Maharashtra Government and the Census of India are some of three biggest customers of Adobe in India, but Adobe managing director Naresh Chand Gupta declined comment on other customers. Chizen said multinational firms and newspaper and publishing firms were customers in the private sector.
Source: IANS
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