Indian-born Narayen is Adobe CEO

Narayen is currently president and chief operating officer and will replace CEO Bruce Chizen from Dec 1, reports Narayanan Madhavan

Adobe Systems Inc, the world’s fifth-largest software company, on Tuesday named Indian-born Shantanu Narayen as its next chief executive officer (CEO), marking the latest of top-level appointments of people of Indian origin in one of the world’s hottest companies.

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Adobe is the company behind popular software like Acrobat that creates the popular pdf documents and Photoshop for photographic editing. It now also owns the popular Flash and Dreamweaver software that powers Internet animation and visual content after it acquired rival Macromedia. Its latest offerings include online video editing software.

Narayen, who is also a keen researcher who holds patents, is currently president and chief operating officer and will replace CEO Bruce Chizen from December 1.

Adobe , which has annual sales in excess of $2.6 billion, has been steadily increasing its software research and development in India, where it has more than 1,000 of its 6,600-plus worldwide staff. “You can see every single product has significant components from here (in India),” Narayen told Hindustan Times in an interview last year.