The Economic Times interviewed Adobe‘s executive vice president and global CTO Abhay Parasnis responsible for the technology strategy and innovation agenda for the company.
Here are some excerpts:
On the future of technology –
Parasnis: There is an entire enterprise market that is being redefined due to the evolution of mobility. It’s more evident in markets like India and China as lot of users skip the traditional desktop-form factor of delivering software. The other interesting opportunity is the sheer explosion of the content — whether it is the media, or internet of things with sensors. These two trends are fundamentally causing every single industry be it travel and hospitality, financial services or healthcare, to reconcile with this brave new world.
On Adobe’s R&D that is being done in India –
Parasnis: We now have a substantial portion of our core R&D done here. It’s a very strategic market for us from the talent standpoint and not cost standpoint. Virtually, every strategy I talked about, we do R&D here. I’d say there are two or three big initiatives we’re driving, not singularly out of India but the core IP is being driven here. The machine-learning and data-science area; it’s a very cutting edge area. One of the things we recognize is India is a unique place for talent. We have set up a big data machine-learning lab, which does some of our advanced research here.
On Adobe’s strategic strengths –
Parasnis: If you look at Adobe’s business, we have two core strategic strengths in the market place: one is on the creative side. I would say the front-end of the content explosion, we have tools all the way from Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator etc. What mobility is giving us is an opportunity to make these tools become more democratic and bring them down to literally hundreds of millions of users at the high end of the market. The other one, which most people don’t know, is that virtually every single top tier consumer brand on the planet is now powered by Adobe’s backend platforms. We now have around 40 trillion transactions that flow through our platform on the backend.
