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Today, Adobe brings its LiveCycle Enterprise Suite (ES) to the cloud, providing a hosted option for customers to quickly deploy key projects that drive innovation and help prioritize IT investments.

The new LiveCycle Managed Services is a subscription-based service that leverages the power and security of the Amazon EC2 platform. A key component of the offering is the Adobe Network Operations Center, a team of Adobe service professionals that work behind the scenes to manage and monitor operations - taking the burden off a company's internal IT resources.

Watch Paul McNamara, EIR, Cloud Computing, walk through what LiveCycle Managed Services offers on AdobeTV.

To learn more about Adobe LiveCycle Managed Services ES2, visit www.adobe.com/livecycle/cloud

Last Thursday, Jan. 28, I had the privilege of presenting a luncheon keynote at the CMO Summit event in Los Angeles. I co-presented with Peggy Conlon, president and CEO of The Advertising Council, which is an incredible organization. Our message to the audience of senior marketing execs was that it's critically important to get more companies involved in corporate social responsibility to create positive social change.

In my segment of the talk, I highlighted the work we have done with the Adobe Youth Voices program, including our partnership with the Black Eyed Peas' Peapod Foundation. I showed the public service announcement we made with the Peas as well as a youth music video created by a group of 15- and 16-year-old boys at our Redwood City, CA, Adobe Youth Voices/Peapod Academy. Adobe Youth Voices enables kids in under-served communities around the globe to create digital media (videos, animations and still photography) expressing their views on issues in their community. Adobe provides the software and curriculum and faculty and volunteers provide the training and inspiration.

CSR is a great opportunity for all companies to strengthen their brand and connection to their customers. Companies should choose a cause close to their product and culture, so there is good alignment, and they shouldn't be shy about promoting their CSR cause to their customers. Our own research has shown that our customers really want to know more about what Adobe is doing in the CSR space, so we're going to continue to get the word out. The positive feedback from my peers showed me there is a lot of interest and enthusiasm in the marketing community for CSR, and I'm hoping this event will lead to more discussion about how we can help make a difference.


Peggy Conlon (right) and I during Q&A at the CMO Summit

• Ann Lewnes is Adobe's senior vice president of Global Marketing and is on the Board of the Adobe Foundation and The Advertising Council

Some have been surprised at the lack of inclusion of Flash Player on a recent magical device.

Ironically, Flash was originally designed for pen computing tablets, about 15 years before that market was ready to take off. Flash exists now only due to its finding an alternate route in its use -- first filling a niche on the Web by enabling low-bandwidth vector graphics in the early days and then rapidly adding new capabilities over the past decade. That includes bringing animation, streaming audio, rich interactivity, arbitrary fonts, two-way audio/video communication, local storage, and enabling the video revolution on the Web.

By augmenting the capabilities of HTML, Flash has been incredibly successful in its adoption, with over 85% of the top web sites containing Flash content and Flash running on over 98% of computers on the Web. It is used for the majority of casual games, video, and animation on the Web and familiar brands like Nike, Hulu, BBC, Major League Baseball, and more rely on Flash to deliver the most compelling experiences to over a billion people.

Now we are at an important crux for the future of Flash. A wide variety of devices beyond personal computers are arriving, many of which will be used to browse the Web, making it increasingly challenging to deliver what creators and users of content and applications have come to expect of Flash on personal computers -- seamless, consistent and rich experiences. The Flash engineering team has taken this on with a major overhaul of the mainstream Flash Player for a variety of devices.

We are now on the verge of delivering Flash Player 10.1 for smartphones with all but one of the top manufacturers. This includes Google's Android, RIM's Blackberry, Nokia, Palm Pre and many others across form factors including not only smartphones but also tablets, netbooks, and internet-connected TVs. Flash in the browser provides a competitive advantage to these devices because it will enable their customers to browse the whole Web. This is being accomplished via the Open Screen Project, where we are working with over 50 partners to make this a reality across a wide array of devices. For example, the recent Nexus One from Google will rock with a great experience in the browser with Flash Player 10.1.

So, what about Flash running on Apple devices? We have shown that Flash technology is starting to work on these devices today by enabling standalone applications for the iPhone to be built on Flash. In fact, some of these apps are already available in the Apple App Store such as FickleBlox and Chroma Circuit. This same solution will work on the iPad as well. We are ready to enable Flash in the browser on these devices if and when Apple chooses to allow that for its users, but to date we have not had the required cooperation from Apple to make this happen.

Longer term, some point to HTML as eventually supplanting the need for Flash, particularly with the more recent developments coming in HTML with version 5. I don't see this as one replacing the other, certainly not today nor even in the foreseeable future.

Adobe supports HTML and its evolution and we look forward to adding more capabilities to our software around HTML as it evolves. If HTML could reliably do everything Flash does that would certainly save us a lot of effort, but that does not appear to be coming to pass. Even in the case of video, where Flash is enabling over 75% of video on the Web today, the coming HTML video implementations cannot agree on a common format across browsers, so users and content creators would be thrown back to the dark ages of video on the Web with incompatibility issues.

The productivity and expressiveness of Flash remain advantages for the Web community even as HTML advances. The Flash team will drive innovation over the coming years as they have over the past decade to enable experiences that aren't otherwise possible. With the ability to update the majority of Web clients in less than a year, Flash can make this innovation available to our customers much more quickly than HTML across a variety of browsers.

Our mission at Adobe is to revolutionize how people engage with ideas and information, and we focus daily on how to best empower designers and developers to express themselves most fully and creatively. To have the greatest creative control combined with the most productive tools and broadest ability to deploy their content and applications. We support whatever technologies and formats that best enable our customers to accomplish these goals, and work to drive technology forward where there are gaps that we can fill. The blend of Flash and HTML are best together, enabling anyone to make pragmatic decisions to use these for their strengths to make the best experiences on the Web.

Engaging with ideas and information also means ensuring there is an open ecosystem and freedom to view and interact with the content and applications a user chooses. This model of open access has proven to be more effective in the long term than a walled approach, where a manufacturer tries to determine what users are able to see or approves and disapproves individual content and applications. We strongly believe the Web should remain an open environment with consistent access to content and applications regardless of your viewing device.

We are continuing to focus on enabling our customers to do their best work, and helping them reach people effectively and reliably around the world across operating systems, browsers, and a variety of devices.

Update: I've responded as well in the comments below.

We have closed comments on this post but encourage you to continue the conversation on other Adobe blogs. Check out the links to the right and at the bottom of the page, or visit blogs.adobe.com for a complete list of Adobe blogs.

Interesting day - the world's response to Haiti is taking center stage in a number of sessions. President Clinton today reminded people to follow through on their commitments once all the cameras turn off. He is making a big push for a worldwide response to get the nation of Haiti rebuilt and retrained, referring to them as "one of the most resilient people I have ever met". On a personal note, I actually got to shake his hand, which was kind of cool.


Caption: Clinton speaking on how to help rebuild Haiti

The financial industry is on the defensive, calling their role in getting us into this monetary crisis, the ultimate "burden of trust" that they will have to bear with the world community.

IT continues to play a strong role in bringing developing nations to prosperity. In the high-tech philanthropy session Nick Negraponte, Melinda Gates and the Intel Foundation were strong advocates of continuing to push connected devices directly into the hands of children, and not to schools where many teachers are less tech saavy than the kids!


Caption: Melinda Gates, Nick Negraponte, Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia and others discuss high tech philanthropy

Also met several government officials today who are pleased with the WELCOM platform and the role Adobe is playing in transforming citizen interaction. I am pitching everyone, everywhere I get a chance (tirelessly) and will continue this until about 2AM tonight.

Don't miss Don Tapscott's article on WELCOM.

More tomorrow.

Rob
SVP/GM, Business Productivity Solutions, Adobe

Follow me on Twitter for more updates from Davos.

Did not get a chance to attend many sessions - Social Networking panel discussion this morning was interesting, but it is clear that no one quite understands how the growth of social networks is really going to impact corporate behavior. Don Tapscott gave example of Best Buy as a company that really uses the power of Community to drive their customer support - I am going to try to spend some time with the CEO to understand better what their strategy is.

Interesting meetings with the large Indian SIs and outsourcers (Cognizant, TCS) as they are very aggressively investing in more resources and headcount in India. Met with George Colony of Forrester who understands the concept that Adobe is transforming user experience in enterprise applications and wants to hear more.

Most interesting conversation of the day was with Bob Kimmitt of Deloitte, former Deputy Treasury Secretary to Hank Paulson and my boss at Commerce One (President and COO there) - Bob sees a tremendous game of chicken with China coming down the road as they seek to list their companies abroad but aren't willing to play by the corporate rules of other nations. There is a tremendous polarization that has happened based on Google's response to China, and it will be interesting to hear more of the discussion tonight at the dinner.

Signing off...

Rob
SVP/GM, Business Productivity Solutions, Adobe

Follow me on Twitter for more updates from Davos.

The "Future of Publishing" is the new hot-topic, with media focusing on the devices that will deliver digital newspapers, magazines and books. Well hardware is nothing without software and - as you'd expect, with over 25 years partnering with the print publishing industry - Adobe technology is powering this transition, as new digital formats and new reading patterns emerge.

This spring, expect to see Adobe out and about, showing some of our latest tools and technologies - developed by ourselves and in collaboration with publishers. We think you'll love what we have to demo, so check us out if you're coming to the events below:

Tools of Change for Publishing
http://www.toccon.com/toc2010

Mobile World Congress
http://www.mobileworldcongress.com/

FIPP Digital Innovators' Summit
http://www.vdz.de/innovators-summit-news.html

South by Southwest
http://sxsw.com/interactive

Keynote presentation from Adobe SVP of Creative Solutions, John Loiacono
Future of Publishing Summit
http://futureofpublishingsummit.com

In the meantime, to whet your appetite, click on the links below to find out more about how Adobe is delivering a digital future for publishers and readers.

Digital newspapers
Times Reader 2.0 - a collaboration with The New York Times to deliver newspaper content in an interactive, Adobe AIR-based application

Digital magazines
Condé Nast/Wired Magazine - a collaboration with Condé Nast to deliver the digital magazine experience on tablet devices

eBooks
EPUB and PDF - the standards for reflowable and final-form eBooks, enabling consumers to transfer eBooks across devices. Adobe is driving EPUB adoption with more than 100 industry partners
Content Server 4 - rights management and content protection for PDF and EPUB eBooks Reader Mobile 9 SDK - PDF and EPUB eBook rendering support on smartphones and dedicated eReading devices
Digital Editions - free, lightweight, desktop reading application for PC and Mac

Content authoring
Creative Suite 4 Design Premium - the ultimate tookit to deliver rich, creative publishing experiences across media
Digital Publishing Technology Center - technical resource center to stay up-to-date on the latest publishing standards and tools

Follow the team
On Twitter @AdobeEbook

Interesting report published this morning by SoDA (the Society of Digital Agencies) about the current state of the digital marketing industry -- increase in online marketing spending, new and emerging trends, as well as uptick in jobs in 2010.

Surveying more than 1,000 industry professionals -- with more than 30% of those surveyed from traditional ad agencies and corporate brands -- the 2010 Digital Marketing Outlook also reveals the most sought after technical skill sets.

• Adobe Dreamweaver and Adobe Flash dominating along with other popular technologies like HTML, CSS, ActionScript, WordPress and Drupal.
• 75 percent of survey respondents indicating Adobe Flash as the most important tool for their organization
• Flash remaining the No. 1 skill that nearly 80 percent of respondents will look for when hiring new staff this year
• More than 50 percent say Microsoft Silverlight is not used in their organizations while only seven percent consider it an important technology

The full report can be viewed here.

Recently, the BBC announced the iPlayer, their on-demand service to watch BBC television programming broke 100 million requests for programs in a month, for the first time.

This is exciting news because in 2007 we started to collaborate with the BBC and they rolled out Flash to deliver web video. Then, in 2008 the BBC introduced the BBC iPlayer for the Desktop using Adobe AIR. The desktop application allows viewers in the UK to watch their favorite BBC shows, online or offline. In a short period of time, the BBC was able to rollout the technology and get huge returns.

Congratulations BBC, what a great way to start off the new year!

Much of the media coverage earlier this week suggesting Adobe software may have been a vector used in the recent attacks against Adobe and other companies was based on information provided by iDefense. Today, iDefense provided the following statement:

"In iDefense's press announcement regarding the recently discovered Silicon Valley compromises, we stated that the attack vector was likely "malicious PDF file attachments delivered via email" and suggested that a vulnerability in Adobe Reader appeared to have been exploited in these attacks. Upon further review, we are retracting our initial assessment regarding the likely use of Adobe vulnerabilities. There are currently no confirmed instances of a vulnerability in Adobe technologies being used in these attacks. We continue to investigate this issue."