SOFTWARE: Made in India!

For three weeks now, Lekhraj Sharma has been working till 4 am, taking a

break only to snatch a few winks. By 8 am, he’s back at work–another 18-hour

stint. His demeanor, however, shows no fatigue; instead, he is cherubic and

voluble! "It is the joy of creation," he insists. Sharma is not

unique, he is just one cog in the 27-member Adobe India development team that is

applying finishing touches to the latest version of what is among world’s

best-known software, Adobe PageMaker. The PageMaker 7.0 project, started out

only a year ago, is near completion and will mark the first instance of a

product of this significance being developed within the country.

Sector II of Noida, a Delhi suburb, is where it is all happening. Few

passers-by have an idea about the goings-on inside the center. People between

the ages of 20 and 30 years move in and out… software wizards? Perhaps. Inside

is a huge rectangular hall, cabins on all sides and in the middle, housing

nearly 100 desktops and as many professionals. It is here that 30 people worked

on PageMaker 7.0, with occasional help from others on a need-some basis.

Naresh Gupta, Adobe India’s managing director, admits that it hasn’t been

easy-going. "In fact, it has been tough, really tough," he says.

"We were working with a 15-year-old code base, gigantic in size and

enormously complex in nature. And we couldn’t find a single person who would

be familiar with all the components; such was the legacy of the software."

What were the problems once the development took off? "Well, the highly

distributed nature of the team–part of which was located in the US–ensured

that the project regularly remained blessed with hiccups of coordination and

integration." While engineering was mostly in India, other functional teams

were in the US. Marketing and customer support teams, for instance, were in

Seattle.

Why India?

Let’s first say, ‘How India?’ The India development center had already

worked on major components of a host of Adobe products in the past, and over

time, gained the kind of maturity required for full-fledged product development.

And Gupta, in consultation with senior team members, decided that the time was

ripe to go for it. "The Indian team made a proposal to the top management,

which went through market evaluation and RoI analysis like any other project

proposal. Once the analysis showed scope for positive return on investment and

the need for an upgrade, the project was approved."

And how much of the move has been inspired by the fact that QuarkXPress has

stolen a march over PageMaker in India? "Not much really. PageMaker

addresses the business-publishing segment and doesn’t directly compete with

QuarkXPress. It’s InDesign, another Adobe product, that is targeted at the

high-end professional publishing market."

Was cost of development a major consideration for carrying out the work at

Noida? While informed sources insist that it has been much cheaper–one-third

of the cost in the US–for Adobe to get the development done entirely in India,

Gupta won’t buy the theory. "Salaries of employees in India are going up

and the difference between India and US salaries is coming down. Adobe offers

the same ESOPs in India as are offered to employees elsewhere. Further, product

bonuses are similar to those offered in the US."

Feature-rich structure

PageMaker 7.0 has completed beta testing, and crossed most of the debugging

stages. It has also undergone successful demonstrations at many sites across the

world. The product is now ready for a global launch, which, Adobe says, will be

this summer itself. "Reviews have been positive and we already see a strong

reception for PageMaker 7.0 in the market," says Gupta. "Chances are

that the launch will happen in July itself."

The new version remains targeted at corporate houses, SOHO users and

educational institutions. New features that are expected to generate lot of

interest in the market are enhanced support for network publishing, improved

workflow support and seamless creation of PDF files through in-built tools.

Other features include improved support for importing Microsoft Word and

QuarkXPress files. Gupta is confident that the feature-rich new version will

help Adobe significantly improve its marketshare in the targeted user segments.

Barriers broken

Having spearheaded the development of two products in a row–Adobe’s IDC

earlier developed the Acrobat Palm OS, released on May 29)–Gupta’s

confidence is sky-high. The Acrobat Reader for Palm OS has already been received

well, with over 750,000 copies of the software downloaded from Adobe’s site.

This also means that a large number of Palm users are already there to start

using the ‘tagged PDF’ feature being introduced in PageMaker 7.0. The

feature will allow users to view any pdf file transferred from a PC to Palm

devices.

Gupta is sure his team will continue creating best-of-the-class products and

technologies. He hopes to see more products coming out of Adobe’s IDC. He is

also of the view that the PageMaker 7.0 launch will set the much-awaited ground

for other companies to come out with products of a similar reach and scale. And

once the phenomenon takes off, the country will be catapulted much higher on the

infotech value chain.

Rajeev Narayan and Deepak

Kumar in New Delhi