March 21st, 2007

Adobe's Q1 financials show "developer revenue" is still very small

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 7:46 am

Categories: Adobe, Apollo, Flash, Rich Internet Applications

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Yesterday while I was here in New York, Adobe was doing the Wall Street dance and talking with people about financials for it's first quarter in 2007. For the most part, it was great news. Adobe's profit was up 37% and the stock responded accordingly. This is even more impressive when you think about the fact that this was in many ways the calm before the storm that will be the Creative Suite 3 release. But lets dig into the numbers a bit deeper.

The thing that always strikes me about Adobe's revenue numbers is how little Flex really means to them. Creative solutions, things like Flash and Photoshop, earned $346.4 million for Adobe in Q1. That was slightly down from the $364.1 that the products earned in the last quarter of 2006. Enterprise and developer solutions, which is where Flex and LiveCycle fit in, earned a paltry $50.9 million dollars. It's the second lowest earning business unit after mobile devices. But unlike the mobile device unit, which grew by 13% to $13.7 million, enterprise and developer solutions revenue fell from $52 million. (Here is a PDF of which products are in which business units)

To put all of that in perspective, revenue for the entire quarter was $649.4 million so the server products that I cover and talk about so much are a measly 7% of the companies total revenue. In the end, I hope to see more growth in the enterprise and developer solutions unit. It's led by David Mendels, who has been great for the community and has an excellent team in place. But it's still such a small part of Adobe that when we talk about the developer wars, we need to keep this in perspective. Apollo may increase the developer numbers, but the big question is how that ties back to revenue for Adobe.