Adobe Plans Hosted Services in Europe

Adobe Systems is putting in the infrastructure necessary to offer hosted services in Europe, including its Connect web-conferencing tool.

Craig Tegel, its managing director for Northern Europe, said Adobe Connect is the new name introduced last year for the Breeze product the San Jose, California-based ISV got when it bought Macromedia in 2005.

“It can be hosted or licensed, [either way] using a client on the desktop that’s based on the Flash Player,” he said. It is already offered as a hosted service in North America, and now the company is putting the infrastructure into the Irish capital, Dublin, to extend that to Europe.

Connect competes with web-conferencing services including WebEx (now part of Cisco) and Microsoft’s LiveMeeting. Interestingly, Cisco struck a deal with Adobe days before it bought WebEx to embed Connect into its IP phones, and Tegel said that arrangement persists despite the WebEx acquisition “because Connect has applications in areas such rapid e-learning and training.”

He said there will also be other hosted services such as Share (a collaboration platform) and Premier Elements (for video editing).