LOS ANGELES — At Adobe MAX, The Creativity Conference, Adobe accelerated its shift to the cloud with a major update to Adobe Creative Cloud, the company’s flagship offering for creatives.
The update to Creative Cloud is packed with features, re-imagining the creative process through a new set of "CC" desktop applications and enhanced cross-device collaboration and publishing. With this update, creative files can be stored, synced and shared, via Creative Cloud, on Mac OS, Windows, iOS and Android; and Behance, the online creative community, is integrated with Creative Cloud, so customers can showcase work, get feedback on projects and gain global exposure.
Creative Cloud's advanced capabilities are making it a hit with the worldwide creative community: more than a half million paid members, and well over 2 million free members have signed up for Creative Cloud since it was launched in April 2012.
Adobe also announced that the company will focus creative software development efforts on its Creative Cloud offering moving forward. While Adobe Creative Suite 6 products will continue to be supported and available for purchase, the company has no plans for future releases of Creative Suite or other CS products. Focusing development on Creative Cloud will not only accelerate the rate at which Adobe can innovate but also broaden the type of innovation the company can offer the creative community.
"We launched Creative Cloud a year ago and it has been a runaway success," said David Wadhwani, senior vice president and general manager, Digital Media, Adobe. "By focusing our energy - and our talented engineers - on Creative Cloud, we're able to put innovation in our members' hands at a much faster pace."
On top of new collaboration and publishing services and the integration of Behance, the announced update to Creative Cloud includes versions of Adobe's next generation of desktop applications - including Adobe Photoshop CC, InDesign CC, Illustrator CC, Dreamweaver CC, and Premiere Pro CC. Adobe's desktop tools, previously known as Creative Suite (CS), are now branded CC to reflect that they are an integral part of Creative Cloud and have been reinvented to support a more intuitive, connected way of creating.
Adobe is facilitating the transition to Creative Cloud with attractive pricing plans and promotions for individual members, teams and enterprise customers. Adobe will continue to sell licenses for all CS6 products via electronic download from adobe.com and participating resellers.
Adobe Creative Cloud is a membership-based service that provides users with access to download and install Adobe creative desktop applications; game developer tools and integration with the Adobe Touch Apps. With Creative Cloud membership, users also have access to: a vibrant global creative community; publishing services to deliver apps and websites; cloud storage and the ability to sync to virtually any device; and new products and exclusive updates as they're developed.
By signing up for Creative Cloud today, creatives will be set up to immediately download and use these latest cloud-enabled innovations from Adobe, when they are available next month. Creative Cloud membership for individuals is $49.99 per month based on annual membership; existing customers who own CS3 to CS5.5 get their first year of Creative Cloud at the discounted rate of $29.99 per month. Students and teachers can get Creative Cloud for $29.99 per month. Promotional pricing is available for some customers, including CS6 users.
A team version of Creative Cloud includes everything individual members receive plus 100GB of storage and centralized deployment and administration capabilities. Creative Cloud for teams is priced at $69.99 per month per seat. Existing customers, who own a volume license of CS3 or later, get their first year of Creative Cloud for teams at the discounted rate of $39.99 per month per seat if they sign up before the end of August 2013.