point
The Smart Techie was renamed Siliconindia India Edition starting Feb 2012 to continue the nearly two decade track record of excellence of our US edition.

October - 2006 - issue > Made in India

Adobe India's Edge

Sanjeev Jain
Saturday, September 30, 2006
Sanjeev Jain
Naresh Chand Gupta, the managing director of Adobe India is ecstatic about PageMaker Version 7.0. It’s because he led the team that produced a product that still gets enough publicity, five years after it was launched. It was this product that spruced up the image of Adobe-India, the largest development center outside its San Jose, California headquarters. For Gupta and a few others, the reviews are equivalent to a victory that calls for celebration.

It was the first ever Adobe software developed in India that wowed the world in spite of the lack of prior experience in developing complete software products.

For Gupta, the moment of reckoning came in June 2000 when Shantanu Narayen, President and Chief Operating Officer of Adobe called on him to develop the next version of PageMaker. The team at Adobe’s San Jose and Seattle Development Centers that had developed the earlier version of PageMaker had been dismantled. Rebuilding that team was against the long-term vision of Adobe as they were assigned to work on a new pagination software product based on new architecture. So Gupta was asked to take over the project and prepare a plan on how the project will proceed.

Fortunately Adobe India had Arvind Jha in its ranks with experience in the publishing software industry. In July 2000, Gupta and Jha went to San Jose to present the plan that was approved.

However the India team had to overcome issues like gauging the top level of architecture, identifying the codes, which needed to be changed and those to be retained and ascertaining additional required functionalities. “Since the team here lacked experience, nobody gave us much chance of success with this project,” Gupta says.


Share on Twitter
Share on LinkedIn
Share on facebook