With software piracy rate still hovering at an alarmingly high rate of 71 per cent in India, Adobe India, a US-based software solutions company, is planning tie-ups with various educational institutions to market original software at a discounted rate.
Piracy rate for Adobe software was currently around 90 per cent, said Sandeep Mehrotra, country sales manager, Adobe systems, India.
This means, for one original Adobe software sold legally, there were eight to nine copies of fake software in use in the market.
The recently released Business Software Alliance report on software piracy reported that last year India recorded a one per cent drop in software piracy.
Currently, the education version of Adobe softwares were available at up to 70 per cent discount at Adobe distribution centres.
The company was planning to tie up with education boards and universities to include its software learning programmes in school and college curriculum.
Further, the company aimed is to equip kids with Adobe software right from the kindergarten level.
Over the next year the focus of the company would be on tier-II cities, with stress on areas like web-designing, animation, advertisement, printing and publishing, animation, content production and e-learning. Apart from this, Adobe planned to stage road shows in tier- II cities for the promotion of its latest Creative Suite 3 software.
The six configurations of the software were customised for different purposes, likeprint, web, interactive and mobile design.
The company was bullish on eastern India market, which it said was yet to be tapped to the fullest.
For the year 2007-08, it was targeting a growth rate of around 15-20 per cent from the region. Currently, it had four reselling points in Kolkata. "While there are no immediate plans to increase the number of distribution points, we may add another one or two points for web designing," said Prabhjeet Singh, head , marketing, Adobe India.
The company was conducting market surveys to assess the market, he added.
