Adobe Acquires Digital Rights Management Division Of Navisware

San Jose, CA - Adobe Systems Incorporated announced it has acquired the FileLine Digital Rights Management (DRM) division of Navisware, an established technology company bridging computer aided design (CAD) and enterprise intelligence. The acquisition will provide new capabilities for Adobe LiveCycle Policy Server to persistently protect business critical documents in PDF, Microsoft Office and CAD formats, independent of how they are stored or delivered inside and outside the firewall. The terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

"In today's competitive global environment, financial services, government, and manufacturing organizations must be able to securely extend their business processes outside the firewall to collaborate with partners and suppliers," said Chris Christiansen, vice president Security Products and Services, IDC. "Organizations must manage legal and regulatory risks, and safeguard against intellectual property theft by applying persistent protection and control over sensitive information, in any format in which it resides."

"We deal with thousands of different documents during every construction project," said Joseph Diianni, director of technology at the U.S. Green Building Council, the nation's foremost coalition of organizations providing certification for constructing environmentally responsible, profitable buildings. "By securing a wider range of materials, Adobe is making it easier to adopt more integrated, automated processes for sharing and collaborating on building information."

Privately held and based in Raleigh, North Carolina, Navisware developed FileLine to provide DRM capabilities for a wide variety of document types critical to the engineering design process, such as CAD and Microsoft Word documents. These capabilities will be integrated into LiveCycle Policy Server, enabling organizations to apply policies directly to a broad range of documents such as financial, government, or engineering documents containing intellectual property for controlling how, when, and by whom the documents can be used. Additionally, managers and auditors can easily view an audit log of who accessed the document, and indications of improper usage or disclosure. This same DRM technology will help ensure that version control of documents is maintained when the document owner invokes immediate revocation or date-based expiration, helping to prevent costly mistakes based on outdated documents or intellectual property falling into unintended hands.

"The powerful new DRM capabilities that Navisware brings to Adobe's document security solutions will help enable our customers to conduct business more securely, while meeting increasingly stringent regulations for protecting sensitive information," said David Mendels, senior vice president, Enterprise and Developer Business Unit at Adobe. "When combined with the growing ecosystem of Adobe LiveCycle Policy Server partners such as Canon, eGain, Entrust, and Fuji XEROX, we can offer our customers end-to-end security for protecting the entire information lifecycle from creation, through distribution and collaboration, to archival and destruction."

SOURCE: Adobe Systems Incorporated