Adobe today released LiveCycle Managed Services on the Amazon Web Services platform, enabling development organizations to acquire only the services they need to create targeted, engaging business process-oriented applications.

LiveCycle Managed Services offer an alternative to the on-premises LiveCycle Enterprise Suite 2 modules for creating application definitions that run on the LiveCycle engine, explained Paul McNamara, entrepreneur-in-residence at Adobe. “In the days of packaged software, vendors would try to put every available feature in their software. Software-as-a-service is more targeted, has fewer features and is easier to use,” he said.

Among the projects Adobe sees as being a good fit for cloud deployment are those that help businesses jump on new opportunities, that have a limited lifespan, that lack IT resource availability or expertise, or that need to be developed, tested and implemented very quickly.

McNamara said that LiveCycle Managed Services enable developers to more easily obtain preconfigured instances of software to work on, or to quickly create staging servers for testing.

LiveCycle Managed Services are ready today for application staging; production deployments begin on March 8, he said. ES2 modules available under Managed Services include LiveCycle Forms, Adobe Acrobat Reader Extensions, PDF Generator, Process Management, and Content Services, among others. Adobe adds 24×7 support from Adobe engineers.

No pricing has yet been announced.