Adobe Acrobat Direction Points Towards Subscription

Adobe has announced that as of July 1st they will be making changes to their on premise programs. The CLP and TLP programs will be seeing less of a discount to continue to drive their licenses to the subscription based programs of VIP and ETLA. They are also making changes to the upgrade programs for the Perpetual programs. Now the eligibility for an upgrade is only one version back instead of two. Adobe was one of the first publishers to take on premise software and start to offer it in an annuity based plan only. They started with their creative offerings that had a nearly uncontested position in the market with the brand launch of the Creative Cloud. With Acrobat, they have been hinting at this switch as to subscription for a while but gradual changes, like the above, are how they are gently pushing their client base. The PDF Editor market is a lot more competitive and offerings like Kofax's Power PDF and Nitro Pro, can be purchased in perpetual offerings. There is a huge return on investment opportunity by switching to a perpetual PDF offering; however, clients need to take into account things like end user training and compatibility with other applications that have Acrobat integrated in them already.