Umang Bedi, MD, Adobe South Asia, talks to Sanjay Gupta about the impact of Creative Cloud and the role CIOs can play in an increasingly consumer-oriented application world. Excerpts…
How has the piracy situation changed in the recent past and what role is Creative Cloud playing here?
When you look at piracy, it is a function of three things: awareness, availability and affordability. Over the past five years or so the level of awareness of piracy and the need for compliance through initiatives such as enterprise asset management have really been heightened a lot. So we don’t see much illegitimate usage within enterprises.
Now the current reality is that there is a good amount of piracy in SMBs and a high level of piracy in the individual users segment.
The enterprises are really very happy with the functionalities of Creative Cloud. For one, it gives them the facility of single sign-on for multiple applications. Two, they can do license management for employees who need access to particular software much more easily. What’s more, Creative Cloud can be integrated with any popular software asset management tool that an enterprise may have. So Creative Cloud gives enterprises the ability to control who is using a particular software as well as the licensing details of the package. It will further improve the governance levels and bring down privacy, What the enterprises also like about Creative Cloud is that it is in line with most CIOs’ goal of shifting from a capex model to an opex one.
Now, in the other two segments, individuals and SMBs, affordability was a factor. Photoshop came at Rs. 50,000; Creative Suite came at Rs. 1,76,000. Very expensive. Just to share some figures after the launch of Creative Cloud, across the globe two and a half million people tried it out within nine months of the launch. Out of that, there are 500,000 fully paying subscribers – a number we’ll grow to two million paid subscribers by the end of this fiscal.
How about the numbers in India?
We do not break up the India numbers but India is a significant contributor to the cloud strategy. What I can tell you is that 40% of the people who are coming to the cloud site are coming for the first time – they have never purchased an Adobe product. Many of these must have been using Adobe but now that the price points have become affordable (Rs2,230 a month for an SMB and Rs1,000 for an individual), people are finding value and are readily paying…so in the long run, it will help curb piracy.
Given that bandwidth is still poor in many parts of the country, how will Creative Cloud work for professionals?
Typically creative professionals work with heavy files, say, around 100 MB or more. How the Creative Cloud works is that it leverages the existing hardware or compute power the professionals already have. The footprint of the Adobe software sits on their machine, so they do not have to depend on Internet connectivity for being able to work on those heavy files and instead use their own machines. Such a system works even in tier 2 and tier 3 cities where the bandwidth is very low. It’s only once in 30 days that the software will remind you to go to the Creative Cloud site and validate your subscription.
How do you think can CIOs benefit from Adobe software?
In any company, the CIO is going to be the one who is going to drive the entire application architecture. Almost all the applications being built today on HTML5, CSS3 and Java clients, you only need to code them once: at the click of a button you can make them available on any of the 18,500 marked devices – phones, tablets, etc., available in the market today, across Android, iOS, etc.
If you talk to any CIO today, you have two or three words or challenges that always come up: mobility and cloud. Just think of the concept of mobility. People are talking about Bring Your Own Device (BYOD), which means an enterprise has to make all the applications, be it email, CRM or intranet, available on all platforms and devices…what we are doing is enabling faster time-to-market for the CIOs to develop and enable their applications on multiple platforms and devices.
How in your opinion can CIOs become more involved in the consumer-oriented digital strategy of their organizations?
I think the CIO’s role is to create a flexible infrastructure which is adaptable, agile and easily implementable. There was a time when a CIO would work on a project and customize it and continue to do so, until the limit is reached. But today with consumerization of technology and trends such as cloud, they can work on standardized architectures and applications.