Nuance as the Leading PDF Alternative to Adobe Acrobat

Nuance Emerges as the Leading PDF Alternative to Adobe Acrobat, Surpassing One Million Seat Milestone. Windows Vista Ready, PDF Converter Professional 4 Delivers the Tools Needed to Edit, Create and Convert PDF - for One-Third the Price of Adobe Acrobat.

Nuance Communications, Inc., a leading provider of speech and imaging solutions, today announced that its "Better PDF for Business" solutions - PDF Create!, PDF Converter, PDF Converter Professional and PDF Edit Japanese Edition - have been deployed to more than one million desktops, and are by far the best-selling PDF alternatives to Adobe® Acrobat® desktop software worldwide.

The one million seat milestone is especially significant given that Nuance first introduced its PDF product family just over three years ago. PDF Converter, developed in collaboration with Microsoft, was the first-ever solution to convert PDF files into fully-formatted Microsoft Office Word documents, complete with text, columns, tables and graphics. The recently released PDF Converter Professional 4, now the flagship of Nuance's PDF product family, has also benefited from Nuance's ongoing collaboration with Microsoft, especially in the product's support for Windows Vista, the 2007 Microsoft Office system and the XML Paper Standard (XPS), a new same-as-paper electronic format recently put forward by Microsoft.

"Nuance's expertise in PDF conversion lays the groundwork for adding value to the 2007 Microsoft Office system," said Jacob Jaffe, director of Microsoft Office at Microsoft Corp. "As our customers expand their use of the 2007 Office system, we are pleased to see Nuance developing tools to increase productivity and allowing users of Microsoft Office to bring PDF documents into Word, Excel and XPS formats."

Organizations both large and small have discovered the power and benefits within Nuance's PDF applications, including Airbus, ALDA Pharmaceuticals Corp., Bayer Industry Services, Best, Best & Krieger, LLP, Credit Suisse Information Technology, Dassault, The Euro Tunnel, French Ministry of Economy and Finance, EOF Technologies, French Social Security, The Gillette Company, Lockheed Martin Space Systems, Mitsubishi Hitec Paper, The National Institute of Health, Pfizer, Inc., Porsche, Siemens, Telefunken, Trend Micro, Volkswagen, and Wells Fargo.

"The success of PDF Converter Professional is the result of a focused formula - delivering a PDF product designed specifically for business users, with the PDF quality of Acrobat but at one-third to one-fourth the cost," said Robert Weideman, senior vice president and general manager, Productivity Applications, Nuance. "That combination, coming from the leader in document conversion products, is what has made Nuance the clear and trusted alternative to Adobe for desktop PDF applications worldwide."

While Nuance's focus on delivering "Better PDF for Business" has clearly won over customers, it has also gained accolades from respected industry experts worldwide, including The Boston Globe, Business Journals, eWeek, Federal Computer Week, The New York Times, PC Magazine, PC World, PDFZone, Smart Computing and ZDNet - Nuance.