Adobe Unveils Secure PDF Effort
Adobe last week began shipping a secure turnkey digital signature and certification solution for PDF documents. The new turnkey service, part of a partnership with digital certificate provider Geo- Trust, is aimed at stopping document forgery.
The new offering puts Adobe into head-to-head competition with VeriSign, PGP and other players in the digital signature/document certification market.
>> High-volume document solution includes Adobe LiveCycle Server (starting at $50,000 per CPU), cryptographic high-security module ($20,000- $30,000), account management software, annual GeoTrust signing license and signing blocks.
The service initially will be sold direct by both Adobe and GeoTrust. However, both companies are in the process of putting together a program to sell the new solution through their respective channel partners. Executives said a channel program for the new offering should be hammered out in the next three to six months.
"This is a huge opportunity for channel partners," said John Landwehr, group manager for security solutions and strategy at Adobe. "This is a growth opportunity for any solution provider that deals with high volumes of documents. This provides security for anyone doing PDF document publishing." Landwehr expects the solution to have strong traction in the government, legal, insurance and financial services markets.
Todd Barrett, networking sales manager at CPU Sales and Service, a Waltham, Mass.-based security solution provider, said the big obstacle for Adobe and GeoTrust is engaging specialty VARs to get to the many SMBs that can benefit from the new technology.
"Nearly of all our customers are using PDFs for quoting, orders and all kinds of business correspondence," Barrett said. "This is a great potential solution for them. People are starving for security. It is going to require customer education, and that is what the VARs are there for--educating their customers on what technology makes sense for them."