Just spotted this from today’s Adobe’s LiveCycle ES2 announcement:

Adobe is also announcing the ability for enterprise customers to deploy LiveCycle ES2 as fully managed production instances in the cloud, with 24×7 monitoring and support from Adobe, including product upgrades. LiveCycle ES2 preconfigured instances will be hosted in the Amazon Web Services cloud computing environment.

This is neat: Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud handles the infrastructure, but customers get fully supported hosted services from Adobe.

Maintaining a global infrastructure for high-volume cloud services is hugely expensive, which restricts it to a few very large companies. Using Amazon removes that requirement at a stroke. I wonder if Adobe also uses Amazon for Acrobat.com – hosted conferencing and document-based collaboration – or plans to do so?