SOFTWARE: Adobe Systems, the US software company which developed the popular Acrobat programme, will aim to consolidate its Dublin operations at one site this year, and may set up a software development centre in the Republic.
On a visit to Dublin yesterday, Mr Bruce Chizen, chief executive of Adobe, told The Irish Times there were good growth opportunities for the firm's Dublin operations, where it manages all its international business sales.
The company serves the European and Asian markets from Dublin which account for about 50 per cent of Adobe's total sales. It employs 79 staff at two Dublin sites in Blackrock and Citywest, following its acquisition of the software firm Accelio this year.
Mr Chizen said Adobe's markets had stabilised now following the economic downturn and its business process management arm, which includes an e-paper division, was growing strongly.
"We believe we can achieve growth of 20 per cent and higher when the economy recovers," he said. "But we are not anticipating a better economy this year. By 2003 we hope so."
The acquisition of Accelio would enable Adobe to add better solutions to its products that would enable companies to extract information from electronic documents and put them into enterprise systems, he said.
"We're always looking for great engineers and often we hire one or two people and then an operations grows around that," he said. "I could foresee that happening in Dublin."
Meanwhile, Mr Chizen said he said he was hopeful that an US judge would triple a $2.8 million (€3.08 million) award against a rival US firm Macromedia for breach of patent.
This dispute centred on Adobe's "reconfigurable tabbed palette patent", which covers the way its software displays multiple sets of information in the same area of the computer screen.
Last week the jury ruled in favour of Adobe in the patent trial and the judge is expected soon to issue his decision on their damages award.
A counter suit taken by Macromedia against Adobe is due to be heard either today or next week. In a statement Macromedia, which develops design software, said it believed the verdict was wrong.
