Adobe recently announced the acquisition of Antepo, an enterprise instant messaging (IM) company with presence capabilities. Antepo’s technologies will be integrated into the Adobe Acrobat software family, which includes Acrobat Professional and Acrobat Connect.

Research firm Gartner believes that with the acquisition of instant-messaging vendor Antepo, Adobe will add IM capabilities to its Acrobat software portfolio, further augmenting its content creation services with collaboration elements.

Although Adobe's strength has been in the authoring and publishing tools market, Gartner feels that enterprise-level collaboration will require a more direct and focused sales effort.

Adobe's acquisition of Macromedia resulted in re-branding Breeze (Macromedia’s Web conferencing product) to Adobe Acrobat Connect, and brought the first wave of real-time collaboration capabilities to integrate into its document-centric collaboration strategy.

"This "buy versus build" approach of gaining collaboration components can potentially move Adobe more quickly into the enterprise market," mentioned an analysts from Gartner.

Adobe plans to embed IM and presence capabilities into its product line, particularly in Acrobat, and ultimately create links to Microsoft and IBM via Antepo's dual protocol (XMPP and SIP/SIMPLE) IM and presence platform.

The research firm believes that Adobe faces the challenge of finding a niche where it can add value to collaboration capabilities from incumbents such as Microsoft and IBM, where Adobe’s document-centric collaboration can be used with Windows SharePoint Services or IBM Lotus QuickPlace (Quickr).

In addition, Adobe will have to integrate Antepo technology into the Acrobat framework and maintain support for Antepo customers. Analysts feel that Adobe must also continue to improve its enterprise focus in sales and marketing efforts outside of its traditional creative-professionals customer base.

Gartner recommends that Antepo customers on the current platform shouldn’t upgrade now, but should ask about Adobe’s plans for support and details regarding integration plans for the product. Also, enterprises should ask Adobe to share how it plans to incorporate Antepo product features into existing and future Adobe products.