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SYS-CON: Every time people talk about Adobe, talk about the merger, we tend to answer because we know that our existing viewers will be comfortable with ColdFusion, will be comfortable with Dreamweaver, will be comfortable with Flash, but you have a huge product set now. Go for it. Tell them what you're now looking after. It bewilders me, not what they do but just how many there are.

Mendels: The group I run at Adobe is called our Enterprise and Developer Business Unit. We have a couple of different business units; the biggest is the Creative Business Unit, which is where products like Photoshop and InDesign are, and now also Flash and Dreamweaver; and in the Enterprise and Developer Business Unit, Flex and ColdFusion, and also a major product line of ours called LifeCycle. So a lot of different things.

What's LifeCycle? LifeCycle is about connecting people and processes and information in document work flows and helping people to build applications that can streamline what have traditionally been paper-based processes, whether it's a mortgage loan process or an insurance process using PDF, using interactive forms in PDF, building that into workflow, then creating composite documents, security note documents, adding rich management to those documents, sending them back to take very complex business processes and really streamline them and reduce the cost and increase the efficiency.

One of the things we've really focused on in the past six months since we joined Adobe is, how can the idea of Rich Internet Applications in Flex and this idea of intelligent documents in LifeCycle come together. We have some beautiful examples in the labs and a lot of stuff that will be coming out over the next year or two where you can take these rich front ends with Flex and tie them into back ends that have these document workflows to create powerful applications and solve interesting problems. We're seeing lots of interest in government and in banking and in health care and in life sciences; it's an exciting time.

SYS-CON: I have this sense of your empire being really a crucible of what's to come, as well as amazing things going on at the moment. People need to track you guys and also through things like this and through the magazines. Another question people sometimes ask is, what is going to happen to ColdFusion. It's just booming.

Mendels: Yes, ColdFusion is doing great.

SYS-CON: Is eight coming up in the wings?

Mendels: What we have right now is early in the Mystic beta and that is coming out the end of June together with Flex, and what we've done is, we've rolled out all the hot fixes and bug fixes of the last year into a single release and we've built a whole bunch of new functionality for interfacing with Flex. One of the things we're really focused on is how do we help the ColdFusion audience take advantage of this new technology using what they already know and using the technology area of Life Cycle. That's coming out at the end of June and it will be free to all the ColdFusion users. Next year you will see Scorpio, which will be ColdFusion 8. The team is hard at work on that and we have some really great stuff coming. You'll see it in labs before we ship it so there will be a chance for you to give us feedback.

SYS-CON: I know Simon Horwith, editor-in-chief of ColdFusion Developer's Journal, always said, and it's well worth saying, it's a fantastic time to be a ColdFusion developer. That's his mantra at the moment.

Mendels: I think you'll see lots of interesting synergies with ColdFusion and PDF. Even before we merged we were using ColdFusion to generate PDF reports. You'll see us generating PDF forms and secure PDF documents and all kinds of things that the ColdFusion audience will have an opportunity to do in a way that nobody else can.

SYS-CON: David Mendels, thank you so much for talking with SYS-CON.TV.

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