When we put Amazon Web Services (AWS) in our list of top 10 enterprise products of 2008, a few readers were skeptical that AWS was enterprise ready. This is a perception issue that Amazon faces. Amazon needs more partners that build apps for the enterprise. Adobe, meanwhile, wants to convince the kind of developers who love AWS that they should develop more business apps using its LiveCycle platform. This is the context for Adobe’s announcement today that LiveCycle will be powered by AWS.
J2EE Stack On AWS
Basically, what Adobe has done is put a Red Hat JBoss J2EE stack on AWS and deployed LiveCycle on the stack. This will make the prototyping, developing, and testing cycle a lot easier and should bring a lot more developers to the Adobe LiveCycle platform.
The type of applications that are typically developed on LiveCycle are write-intensive and transactional; in other words, not the type that AWS is best suited for. When I asked the Adobe team about this, they said that the announcement was about using AWS as a development and testing platform, not necesarily as a deployment platform.
So Adobe is taking this step by step, usually a wise move in the enterprise space.
Why LiveCycle?
For those who don’t know LiveCycle, here are my Cliffs Notes:
- It has been around for 5 years (so you really should know about it by now!). We looked at it in detail when Update 1 was announced back in June of last year.
- It performs Business Process Management (BPM): you know, all those sign-offs that have to happen before someone gets paid.
- It leverages AIR and Flex to give you rich Internet and mobile features. Adobe shows this to some effect with a demo featuring an insurance claims process for a car accident; the kind with those diagrams of where on the road the accident happened and gory pictures of a banged-up Prius.
Our Take
Dynamic BPM, in which processes need to adapt quickly to the real world, is a big deal. Adobe sure understands documents, and BPM, in the end, is all about documents. Putting LiveCycle on AWS will make the prototyping, development, and testing cycle quicker and enable more developers to quickly start working with the platform and making money.
What do you think? Do you use LiveCycle? Will you look at it now that it is on AWS?
