SwiftView Spies Document-Publishing Software Niche

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March 01, 2001 (2:11 PM EST)

SwiftView Spies Document-Publishing Software Niche

By Charles Bermant,

Adobe Acrobat's stranglehold over the document viewing market is being challenged this week by SwiftPublish, a similarly configured plug-in offered by SwiftView.

But instead of trying to capture a healthy portion of Acrobat's estimated 110 million users, the new product attempts to address vertical markets with more stringent formatting needs.

"It's unrealistic for any small company to have any high expectations for this market," said Randy Prakken, president of SwiftView Inc., Portland, Ore. "But in certain areas—like loan document processing, engineering and manufacturing, or applications that require mixed paper sizes—we have found that Acrobat doesn't work well."

SwiftView's flexibility originates from its use of the open PCL file format, as opposed to Acrobat's proprietary PDF, Prakken said.

Tiny Swiftview is already a recognized brand in large technology shops such as Boeing Co. (stock: BA), Cisco Systems Inc. (stock: CSCO), and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. That's because the low-profile developer is no Johnny come lately. Swiftview is the new corporate name of the Northern Development Group, a 15-year-old, privately held technology company whose best-known product carried the brand name SwiftView. NDG changed its name last year to better reflect its focus on electronic publishing and document delivery software products.

Like Acrobat, SwiftPublish lets file recipients view and print but not modify documents with the aid of a free downloadable viewer. Users must purchase the software needed to create the documents, with a single PC license costing $895 and website licenses available from $2,500.

SwiftPublish runs on the PC and Unix but does not run on the Mac because Prakken said the company has received few requests for it.

While the average user may have no reason to switch from Acrobat, SwiftPublish has already found fans in the engineering community.

Milford Chesnut, a hardware development engineer at Hewlett-Packard Co. (stock: HWP), said the program has greater compatibility with engineering tools than Acrobat and allows easy zooming on multipage schematic documents.