About

Hello and thank you for your interest in my Blog. My name is Matthias Zeller. I have been working for Adobe in Product Management since 2003. In my current role I am responsible for the product requirements, evangelizing, and for the roll-out process for the Adobe SAP Alliance.

I grew up in Germany and after high school I went to the European Business School studying Computer Science and Management. My studies allowed me to travel around the world including a foreign semester in San Diego and in London as well as internships in Malaysia and San Francisco. After graduating in 1993 I joined a small software and consulting company in Cologne and soon started to specialize in Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) and B2B Commerce. Three years later I took a Product Management position at GE Information Services managing the roll-out of the first Internet Commerce products from a joint venture with Netscape to the German marketplace. In 1999 shortly after joining Sterling Commerce, a company providing software and services for business collaboration, I moved to their headquarters in Columbus, Ohio. I worked on the initial concepts and Product Management of a new integration broker offering now called Gentran Integration Suite and later focused on building out an E-Marketplace offering. This put me in contact with Commerce One, a company pioneering e-marketplaces and the use of XML for electronic business transactions. At the beginning of 2001 I relocated to Silicon Valley and joined Commerce One to manage the e-marketplace platform MarketSite. When the bubble bursted we re-focused and I was working with a small team to leverage our know-how in XML, integration and workflow to build a new product based on web services standards as a platform to build and operate collaborative composite applications: Commerce One Conductor.

Karen Gee In 2003 my wife Karen, who always has been interested in software for creative professionals, browsed Adobe’s job postings and stumbled across a position which seemed odd at first glance. A Product Management role to build up a new partnership between Adobe and SAP in Germany. Well I was thinking Photoshop integration in SAP business applications is a very small market, but soon I understood the true nature of the partnership. I joined Adobe in San Jose in April 2003 and started to get up to speed on PDF and especially interactive PDF forms based on XML. Two months later I relocated with my wife to Germany (to Heidelberg) to work at the SAP headquarters in Walldorf as the Adobe liason for a new joint product called Interactive Forms based on Adobe software. Fast forward another two years… Our software is now shipping as part of SAP NetWeaver, we have the first customers and the excitement and buzz about Adobe technology is growing in the SAP community. On the 1st of July 2005 I relocated back to the San Francisco Bay Area to build out and evangelize Interactive Forms out of Adobe’s headquarters.

After the acquistion of Macromedia I started to focus on the topic of Rich Internet Applications and Rich Clients for Enterprise Applications. This includes the integration of Flex into SAP NetWeaver and also our joint effort around project Muse.

I live in Palo Alto with my wife and our Panther Chameleon and enjoy regular trips to San Francisco and Berkeley.