Adobe Announces LiveCycle Enterprise Suite 2

Adobe has been releasing a string of new products at its Adobe MAX conference. Following the unveiling of the latest version of its popular runtime environment plugin Flash Player, the software giant is following with the announcement of the Adobe LiveCycle Enterprise Suite 2, a major release of its software compilation of products that allow companies or governments to build applications “that improve interactions with customers and constituents across devices and channels.”

“Adobe LiveCycle ES2 enables enterprises to build software solutions that work the way people work, in a format that people have become accustomed to in their personal lives, with social media, mobile and consumer applications - this is key to driving business in today’s economy,” Rob Tarkoff, senior VP and general manager of Adobe's Business Productivity Business Unit, said. “LiveCycle ES2 offers powerful tools and environments such as model-driven application development, self-service RIA frameworks and streamlined authoring to enable organizations to create applications that more effectively generate, capture, and exchange critical information.”

LiveCycle ES2 is made up of some 14 mostly server-side applications designed to create workflow automation using PDF and Flash. It provides a framework for developing rich Internet Applications for several platforms which can be deployed from cloud-based services like Amazon's Web Services. Adobe believes that by using technologies like Flash and PDF these apps can be much more user-centric and provide a friendlier interface.

Adobe boasts some 5,000 customers for the suite, most of them large enterprises in the financial and other sectors but also governments. It competes with offerings from the usual set of enterprise and business software companies like Microsoft, IBM or EMC. The suite now boasts several new products like Mosaic a framework for creating apps that could reside on the desktop or mobile clients and which can be configured to show different information relevant to the task. LiveCycle is expected to become available by the year's end.