The companies, along with the Web's leading standards organisation, are launching new e-forms initiatives aimed at smoothing the collection and flow of business data.
The sudden rush into the market is being fuelled by the potential for big profits. Right now, American businesses alone spend more than $15bn (£9bn) transferring data from paper-based forms such as loan applications and purchase orders to their computer systems, according to analyst estimates. Software makers are banking on a desire among businesses to trim those costs.
The software companies' interest in e-forms also stems from the growing adoption of extensible markup language (XML) as the common language of business data. Collecting data electronically is only half the problem -- it still has to be easily transferable to whatever department needs it. XML-based forms are designed to automatically shuttle data to various back-end systems, such as corporate databases and customer relationship management (CRM) setups.
"We feel like Microsoft and Adobe have cast a big spotlight into the e-forms domain," said Dennis Clerke, chief executive of Cardiff Software, one of the smaller companies jumping into the fray.
Microsoft is set to intensify the scramble for customers in the nascent e-forms market later this month when it releases InfoPath, a key new application included in Office System, which is a family of applications that revolves around the company's widespread productivity software.
While InfoPath is expected to be used mainly by employees for internal business processes, Adobe is looking to tackle a wider swath of customer interactions with an e-forms approach that casts its widespread portable document format (PDF) as a basis for creating and processing easy-to-use e-forms suitable for loan seekers, online shoppers and other members of the general public.
A host of smaller companies, meanwhile, hope to play it down the middle with e-forms packages based on various flavors of XML, including the recently finalised XForms specification from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).
