In an exclusive interview with ComputerWire, Adobe’s CEO Bruce Chizen said the company is considering making more use of its dominant market share in the desktop imaging market with its Photoshop and Illustrator packages by launching the equivalent of Apple’s iTunes but for digital imaging.

Adobe’s customers use its Photoshop and Illustrator packages for the creation, manipulation and management of digital content for photographic and graphic design projects. While the company holds dominant market share in this category, it is still on the lookout for ways of generating additional revenue from its installed base.

Apple’s iTunes service has been a runaway success, with the popularity of its iPod digital MP3 player encouraging users to download songs from a trusted, legal provider. Apple said last December that since its launch last April, there had been 25 million downloads from its iTunes site. The company said figures suggest that approximately 1.5 million songs per week and 75 million songs per year are downloaded, and the numbers are on the rise.

Adobe believes it might be able to bring a similar service to its army of creative professionals, offering the ability to download stock photography, design templates and the like from a trusted source – and of course for a fee.

The advantage over going to existing third-party digital content providers would be the potential to more tightly integrate the downloaded content with Adobe’s software packages, enabling perhaps content sizes, resolutions, formats and so on to be decided upon from within Adobe’s applications. Users might not need to leave the confines of their Adobe design environments to search for and subsequently import digital content.

Chizen said discussions about such an idea are still at an early stage. We have not decided whether we might offer such a service in partnership with other providers, like a Corbis, or try and do it ourselves, he said. Corbis is a leading provider of licensed imaging, founded by Bill Gates in 1989.

Meanwhile, Adobe has been attempting to turn itself into more of a platform player for creative professionals than a standalone applications vendor, similar to the strategy adopted by Microsoft when it launched Office. Adobe’s strategy for doing just that included the launch of Creative Suite in September 2003, Creative Suite being a bundle of a number of its popular packages. There are also applications within Creative Suite that can only be bought as part of that bundle, for example Version Cue for digital asset tracking and workflow. Adobe’s latest results show that so far, its strategy of becoming more of a design platform player has been working.

The equivalent of an Apple iTunes may be a little further away than another product area where Chizen sees the potential for stellar growth: its ePaper business based around its popular Acrobat document format. The company is coming to market with server-based software that helps companies to publish, track, manage and maintain documents stored as Acrobat files.

This is going to be a multiple billions of dollars business in years to come, said Chizen. Despite the billions invested in enterprise document management systems most companies know they are still not as efficient as they could be. Using Acrobat and server-based solutions they can start to get there.

This article is based on material originally published by ComputerWire