The Future of LiveCycle

Posted on January 20, 2012 by arun

Since Adobe announced its increased focus on Digital Marketing and Digital Media, the LiveCycle team has met with dozens of customers and partners to discuss the future of LiveCycle.   They are all passionate about our technology and the solutions we provide and have been excited when we have shared our plans with them.  I’d like to share those plans more broadly with you.

To start with, we remain committed to creating further innovations within the LiveCycle product line and supporting LiveCycle customers.  We have a large install base of customers using LiveCycle for Business Process Management, Forms, Security, and Document Generation based applications and solutions that are mission critical to their business.  Adobe fully intends to continue to support, maintain, and enhance the products that they are using.

There are  a number of priority areas that we will make investments in going forward.  The areas which we see as the core offering for LiveCycle ES and are prioritizing our engineering investment around are:

  • Modules: Reader Extensions, Forms, Output, Digital Signatures, Rights Management, Process Management, PDF Generation
  • Tools: Workbench, Designer
  • Solutions: Correspondence Management
  • ECM Connectors: SharePoint, IBM Filenet & Content Manager, Documentum
  • Advanced Offerings: Data Services

We’ve already begun to deliver on our commitment to invest and innovate.  In December, we shipped a service pack for our August 2011 release and also shipped a new feature-packed version of LiveCycle Data Services for Java EE.  Next on our agenda, we will release ECM connector enhancements and updates in the first quarter of 2012.  Looking forward to the second half of 2012, my team is already hard at work on the next version of LiveCycle ES that will include many product feature enhancements.  Keep an eye on the product blogs and forums to see how they will be leveraging HTML across LiveCycle as they start ramping up for prerelease drops.

As we mentioned in an earlier post, Adobe will have a direct selling relationship within select markets like government and financial services.  Additionally, we will leverage our long-standing partner community to represent LiveCycle across all markets.

I hope this helps you understand the future of LiveCycle and I look forward to sharing more information about our 2012 release as the year progresses.

Arun Anantharaman

Vice President and General Manager

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21 Responses to The Future of LiveCycle

  1. Duane Nickull says:
    January 20, 2012 at 3:33 pm

    Arun:

    Thank you for posting this. Much appreciated and it helps a lot of people Uberity have been talking with about LiveCycle’s future.

    Best wishes,

    Duane Nickull

  2. Carm Scaffidi says:
    January 21, 2012 at 6:51 am

    Arun, Thank you for helping us inform people that LiveCycle is alive and growing.

  3. Abhiram G Raj says:
    January 22, 2012 at 1:27 am

    Thanks for the clarity Arun.
    There was a lot of confusion in our client’s minds when it came to LiveCycle’s future.

    Also, if you could throw some light on Adobe’s plan for Flex, AIR and Flash both for desktops and mobiles it would be very helpful.

    Regards,
    Abhiram

  4. Soren Hoy says:
    January 23, 2012 at 4:32 am

    Thanks for your update on this matter; I’ll be looking forward to see the new versions. I would though like to ask you something, what the naming will be of the next releases. You use LiveCycle yourself in the article. I thought it was ADEP Document services now, are you going to go back to LC or what?

    Thanks in advance
    Best Regards
    Søren Høy

    • Josh van Tonder says:
      January 24, 2012 at 6:53 pm

      Thanks for the comment Soren.
      On your question, we’ll provide more details in the near future.

      Thanks,
      Josh van Tonder
      Product Marketing Manager, Adobe

  5. Parth says:
    January 23, 2012 at 4:47 pm

    Hi Arun,

    Good to see some clarification from you on behalf of the team. Looking forward to hearing more about the plans for 2012 and beyond. Also please make sure we have some buzz around enterprise offerings in MAX2012.

  6. Rohan Raj says:
    January 24, 2012 at 7:35 am

    This is really great relief, this post really help customer again building confidence in LiveCycle as their enterprise solution.

    Rohan Raj.

  7. Samartha Vashishtha says:
    January 26, 2012 at 9:11 am

    Thanks for posting this reassuring update, Arun.

    Regards,

    Samartha

  8. Rohan Raj says:
    January 26, 2012 at 11:31 pm

    Hi Arun,

    Please see this gartner link: http://www.gartner.com/id=1850714
    Is it true that you are going to stop working on LC Process Management? The article says:
    “Adobe has made a decisive choice to move away from traditional enterprise software markets and to focus on digital marketing and media. It will also shift aggressively to a cloud delivery model. These moves follow an August 2011 message to customers that Adobe would no longer update LiveCycle Content Services ES2. These actions signal that LiveCycle Process Management ES2 and LiveCycle Content Services ES2 are no longer important to the company’s strategic direction.”

    Please give a clarification.

    Thanks,
    Rohan Raj.

    • Josh van Tonder says:
      February 13, 2012 at 5:09 pm

      Hi Rohan,

      Please see our comment below to Ketan regarding this topic.

      Thanks,
      Josh van Tonder
      Product Marketing Manager, Adobe

  9. Pingback: The LiveCycle Post | The Future of LiveCycle

  10. Gidget says:
    February 1, 2012 at 9:40 am

    Is Adobe going to get Gartner straight on the comments that Gartner made in Novemebr and Decemebr.
    i.e. Gartner…. Adobe business process management suite (BPMS) prospects and customers:

    Consider using other BPMS vendors, unless you are in the public sector and financial services. If you are in the latter sectors, re-evaluate whether Adobe’s process-specific solution strategy will satisfy your business process improvement needs. If you want to support business transformation or continuous process improvement programs, switch to another vendor’s BPMS before making further investments.

    • Josh van Tonder says:
      February 13, 2012 at 5:07 pm

      Hi Gidget,

      Please see our comment to Ketan regarding this topic.

      Thanks,
      Josh van Tonder
      Product Marketing Manager, Adobe

  11. Dan Riggs says:
    February 2, 2012 at 11:08 am

    Great news! My LiveCyle client is pondering their annual renewal of several LiveCycle modules. Your update is very timely and much needed.

  12. Ketan Desai says:
    February 9, 2012 at 4:06 pm

    I am even more utterly confused after reading this blog….
    On one side Gartner is saying that Adobe is going to discontinue its Livecycle portfolio of products- http://www.gartner.com/resources/227500/227592/reassess_adobes_bpm_and_cca__227592.pdf
    And on the other side, this blog says the complete opposite.
    So whats the real story? Rather than blogs, is there any official news release from Adobe that can tell us whats going on? I would trust that more than blogs!

    • Josh van Tonder says:
      February 13, 2012 at 5:00 pm

      Hi Ketan,

      To be clear, Adobe is still investing in LiveCycle and its business process related modules such as LiveCycle Process Management. Together with our partners, LiveCycle will continue to be sold in all industries, not just financial services and government. We believe LiveCycle will continue to be one of the leading business process technologies for automating forms related workflows and specific process-based use cases. We are currently in conversation with Gartner about the published report you referenced.

      Thanks,
      Josh van Tonder
      Product Marketing Manager, Adobe

  13. pushkar singh says:
    March 13, 2012 at 9:41 pm

    Arun/Josh, although its a relief hearing about LiveCycle, but just a quick question whether the newer version of LCES will still comprise of the modified and newly introduced – ADEP Structure made of CRX 2.2 and CQ5 for Experienced Services along with Document Services or will there be any more structural changes further? Lots of Customized Development associated with the Enterprise Middleware tier will be hindered if Adobe fails to keep the uniformity across its enterprise services product. Requesting your views.

    Thanks.
    Pushkar

    • Jeff Stanier says:
      March 14, 2012 at 3:10 pm

      Hi Pushkar,

      Great question.

      LiveCycle ES3 provides the CRX 2.3 QuickStart content repository in the box and a DSC connector from LiveCycle to allow content storage and retrieval. ES3 continues to include the enterprise middleware LiveCycle Data Services 4.6 for Java EE. CQ continues to be sold and is now part of the Digital Marketing Suite. Like LiveCycle, CQ also includes CRX.

      Jeff

  14. John Nesbitt says:
    March 19, 2012 at 4:29 pm

    Arun,

    Is there an upgrade path from Guides to any other technology (HTML5)?

    We’ve developed over 30 Guides all with a common set of extensions (for integration into identity management systems and a custom form portal) that would all be lost if we simply rendered as PDF or HTML (not to mention the layout and skinning that would have to be recreated).

    I heard that in the roadmap in the future is the ability customise HTML output – will this be similar to the way you can customise Guides (in which case one might be able to use Flash Builder to recompile Flex customisations as HTML5 and then reference them from your HTML form output)?

    Thanks,
    John.

    • Jeff Stanier says:
      March 20, 2012 at 3:57 am

      Hi John,

      Just to be clear on Guides, we have marked them as deprecated in ES3 – meaning that they continue to ship with the product for 2 more releases. This allows for upgrade, but we will not be investing in new features. We are planning HTML/HTML5 capabilities that are similar to Guides. I’ll contact you offline and we can talk more.

      Jeff