Adobe (news, site) launched LiveCycle ES2, their platform for document-centric business process management in October of last year. At that time, they talked about a cloud ready version of LiveCycle in the works. Today, that cloud version has become available, and here's a look at what it can do for you.
Building Customer Interaction Solutions
Although LiveCycle ES2 can be used in a number of different scenarios, the primary intention of the platform is to build intuitive, personalized user experience solutions for the customer.
LiveCycle includes a number of applications and capabilities which help organizations build rich applications to support customers. Many of these we covered in detail at its launch in October, including:
Document services: Forms automation, rich PDF documents that can include Flash and rights managed workflows for MS Office documents
Content services: Ad-hoc reviews, comments and approvals, workflow, conversion to PDF with rights management
Business Process Management: WorkBench for creating review and approval workflows
End User Access: Workspace for Mobile and LaunchPad for the Desktop
Developer Tools: Mosaic, a framework for composite applications, plug-in for Flash Builder 4, Collaboration Services, Application modeling
When LiveCycle ES2 was announced, Adobe said they would provide both an on premise edition and a cloud-based deployment options. In fact they said this would include both a development and a production version.
Paul McNamara, responsible for Adobe's Enterprise Cloud Business, told CMSWire that they had strong customer demand for cloud services. Companies, he said, are under increasing pressure to move quicker and be more agile. That pressure, combined with issues managing on premise solutions, is what is driving organizations to move to the cloud. And SaaS solutions, provide the balance.
Enterprise class customers around the world are embracing SaaS as a means of delivering flexible, scalable and cost effective IT solutions to their employees, partners and customers,” said Paul McNamara, Entrepreneur in Residence, Cloud Computing at Adobe. “ LiveCycle Managed Services adds to Adobe’s already substantial presence in the SaaS space and allows Enterprises to develop and deploy engaging, customer-facing applications in the cloud quickly, securely and efficiently, without needing any incremental infrastructure.
Today, Adobe announced a fully hosted, 24x7 managed services environment, on Amazon's EC2 cloud infrastructure, calledLiveCycle Managed Services.
In the same way that you can purchase Adobe LiveCycle ES2 modules in an on premise solution, you can buy the modules you need in the cloud on a subscription basis. The modules available for LiveCycle Managed Services includes:
LiveCycle Forms
Reader Extensions
Rights Management
Digital Signatures
PDF Generator
Output
Process Management
Content Services
Managed Services can be set up as single tenant or clustered system, with Adobe providing all the hardware, software, servers, support and maintenance. All you have to do is use the Managed Services.
Adobe LiveCycle Cloud Deployment architecture
Secure from Head to Toe
Adobe understands your need for a secure environment.
LiveCycle Managed Services is running in a secure data center, managed by Adobe personnel. Each LiveCycle customer runs their own instance, called the "LiveCycle instance". Your instance can be customized as you required and your backend systems can be integrated -- Adobe says as securely as your on premise solutions.
Managed Services are also a big help for developers. Pre-configured instances enable developers to create staging servers quickly to test new applications, resulting in faster delivery to production.
The Drive for Cloud Computing
Just about everyone is offering cloud-based services. From content management to eDiscovery and more, vendors are seeing an increased demand to support both on premise and in the cloud solutions.
IDC research estimated that cloud computing services will to US$ 44.2 billion fy 2013.
And Gartner predicts that by 2012, 20% percent of businesses will have no ownership of IT assets -- fueled by technological developments in 2009, such as virtualization and cloud computing.
These are all interesting forecasts and Adobe seems prime to take full advantage of the new cloud hosted model. As McNamara told us, there is a major shift in enterprise sentiment toward hosted applications. They are ready and have budgeted for SaaS. Now they just need solutions like Adobe's LiveCycle Managed Services to move forward.
About the Author
Barb worked for CMSWire from November 2007 through October 2013. She has over 10 years’ experience as an IT solutions architect focusing on content management and enterprise collaboration. Connect with Barb Mosher Zinck:
