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A Nitro-commissioned survey of Australian knowledge workers shows how employees are opening their organizations up to security risks.

Nitro Pro is the PDF reader and editor that does everything you will ever need to do with PDF files.

One startup in particular that has been privy to the funding environment’s gradual prosperity is Nitro, a document productivity startup founded in 2005.

A remarkable powerful free PDF reader that's packed with handy features you'll use time after time, all presented in a clear, adaptable interface.

Australian document management startup Nitro is seeing big growth in enterprise customers, signing up big names including Toyota – with the channel proving instrumental in its transition from SME focused startup to enterprise player.

Australian document software start-up, Nitro, has leveraged the channel to transition from being an SME-focused player to an “established enterprise tech vendor”, the company said.

In the process of closing a US$15m Series C Funding Round, home-grown Adobe rival Nitro has partnered with investors who would offer ‘great value’ if the document productivity company decides to pursue an IPO, according to founder and CEO, Sam Chandler.

Australian-founded document productivity solutions company Nitro is pushing further international expansion after completing a US$15 million capital raising led by global investment firm Battery Ventures.

The investment brings Nitro’s total funding raised to more than $US35 million ($46 million) since it launched back in 2005. Sydney-based Alium Capital and Regal Funds Management also participated in its latest round.

Nitro, the Melbourne-founded, San Francisco-based document productivity startup, has raised US$15 million ($19.7 million) in a Series C round led by existing backer Battery Ventures, with participation from local investors Regal Funds Management and Alium Capital.

An Australian-born startup that’s declared itself as the main challenger to Adobe Acrobat has wrapped up $US15 million in series C funding.

Australian-founded document productivity business Nitro has closed a $US15 million ($19.7 million) Series C capital raise from a mixture of venture capital and institutional investors, as the business prepares for a potential ASX listing in the next few years.

Recently, Nitro released the results of a survey that focused on how organisations are handling change management; the reshaping of an organisation by the transition of employees and redirection of resources and other operations.

Recent research by Nitro shows Australians aged 18 to 25 (Gen Y) are over-reliant on email, apps, social media and cloud technology, and thus new productivity pitfalls are emerging.

To ensure software implementations are successful, strategic change management should be a top priority for CIOs and leaders across the organisation.

Change management support is an essential requirement for IT professionals when evaluating software partners, according to a survey.

The results of a new study commissioned by Nitro reveal a severe misalignment between the way IT leaders talk about change management and the strategies they have in place to execute these initiatives.

The days of Adobe Acrobat ruling the roost of PDF creation and editing are long gone. If you’re looking for a powerful, yet affordable, alternative to Adobe Acrobat, then Nitro Pro 11 has all the tools you need.

The results of a new study commissioned by Nitro reveal a severe misalignment between the way IT leaders talk about change management and the strategies they have in place to execute these initiatives.

Research from Nitro reveals the hesitancy of Australian business to buy from start-ups. Director of APAC Adam Nowiski explains this could be a result of widespread lack of clarity on what being a "start-up" encompasses.

CIO's Paul Mah shares tips for working more securely and productively in co-working spaces.

Nitro's Adam Nowiski comments on the opportunity for Australian startups to send employees abroad to global offices.

Gina O'Reilly, COO at Nitro, shares different ways to optimize document workflows and drive greater productivity across the entire organization.

The first thing to remember about attracting top tech talent is that it's not all about large salaries and plentiful perks, according to Erica Johnson, Director of Employee Experience at Nitro.

In order to achieve the cohesion necessary to enhance customer experience and satisfaction, we must lay the groundwork for effective information management and document collaboration, writes Nitro COO Gina O'Reilly.

In today’s world, paper is one of the most prevalent, inefficient, and needlessly expensive factors to plague enterprises. Yet most companies are unaware of the costs created from printing processes.

In today's metrics-driven digital landscape, it's worthwhile to evaluate if antiquated document processes are hindering you from maximizing your productivity, effectiveness, and overall success.

Feeling unable to improve their own security and privacy, many seem to just accept the situation, and rarely bother with the hassles of changing their behavior.

The topic of the paperless office still elicits many eye rolls and is treated as something unattainable - dismissible, even - when in fact, corporate sustainability has emerged as a fundamental part of 21st century business strategy.

From an IT perspective, powerful notions like 'innovate,' 'disrupt,' and 'transform' can sound like a huge undertaking, carry with them exorbitantly expensive connotations, and lack a definitive set of actions. So, then, how does an organization approach digital transformation?

Digital transformation isn't just a fancy way to say "go paperless," but rather a core strategy through which businesses achieve significantly improved customer experience, speed, and insight by digitizing information and processes.

It might be possible to start a venture with staff who are based all over the world, but can your employees really pull together effectively when they're separated by thousands of kilometers?

Diginomica's Barb Mosher Zinck shares her chat with Nitro about their research on document-based inefficiencies.

Mark Bragg, Nitro's new Performance and Leadership Coach, discusses his appointment and why other startups should consider making similar roles available.

Aussie start-up Nitro, has jumped at the chance to expand its business into Singapore.

Physical, paper-based processes are comparatively slow and can incur high costs in terms of supplies and lost productivity. Essentially, they are "subject to the friction of the physical world," says Sam Thorpe, Director of Product Strategy at Nitro.

In 2015 'Forbes' magazine rated Ireland as the fourth best country in the world in which to do business. But while Ireland has made great strides, Dublin still has some way to go before it can truly compete on the global stage.

“We can’t imagine a world without Nitro in our business—we wouldn’t be able to do any of the things we need to get done with PDF documents,” said Nitro customer John Plecki of Stock Development.

Commercial software development company Nitro has dispensed with traditional HR and embraced a new model around the employee experience in a bid to drive better business results, according to its COO, Gina O’Reilly.

A new report from Nitro points towards security and cloud computing as two primary targets for businesses’ IT departments this year, with data management, of course, a priority.

PDFs have the second largest install-base in the world, second only to browsers. This pervasiveness brings with it some common misconceptions.

IPO is one step along the road to being a successful company," says Peter Bardwick, Nitro's CFO. "You're just starting off on your journey.

Tech hub' is a term we hear bandied about often, but how is it actually defined?

How can technology leaders cope with rapid business growth? In this interview, Nitro CTO Tiho Bajic explains his strategy.

This article explores what we see as the biggest priorities for businesses in 2016, and how next year leaders can improve practices and workflows in an efficient way.

In this article we'll talk about what we see as the top three priorities for businesses in 2016, with a particular focus on IT management, and how the management teams of next year can improve on their business practices.

“PDF in many organisations has become a place where documents go to die,” CEO Sam Chandler says. “Document productivity and workflow is totally broken in the modern enterprise. We have to reinvent it.”

“At Nitro we are pushing some of the biggest trends in the industry to unleash the value behind them for our customers,” says Roland Tritsch, vice president of infrastructure engineering at Nitro.

In this new role based out of Nitro's growing Dublin office, Roland Tritsch, Nitro's new VP of Infrastructure Engineering, will lead the global infrastructure engineering function, which to date has been primarily located in the company's San Francisco headquarters.

As we near the end of 2015, we are seeing a greater content sprawl than ever before, with more content being produced in the workplace in an ever-widening set of locations. The knock-on effect is that many businesses are having to deal with compromised security, poor sustainability practices and a decline in staff productivity.

Document-productivity vendor Nitro scooped up enterprise software company DoxIQ this month to keep its momentum going to become a cloud-based smart document services vendor. Nitro was founded in 2005 while DoxIQ has only been on the scene a scant 18 months.

Collaboration plays a key role in most team-based organisations, with teams working together on the same set of documents and sharing feedback via email or even on paper.

Here's six of the most common types of office collaborators: do you recognise your colleagues or even… yourself?

Despite being headquartered in San Francisco, Sam Chandler, Founder and CEO of Nitro, still maintains close links back to his roots in Australia. For a long time, he has been a passionate advocate for change that would see Australia catapult itself to become one of the worlds most innovative and entrepreneurial countries. He argues those changes can't wait; otherwise the future will be bleak.

Document management company Nitro acquired enterprise software company doxIQ on Thursday.
The San Francisco-based Nitro is currently transitioning into a cloud-based provider of smart document services. The company has raised $21.6 million in venture capital funding from firms like Battery Ventures and Starfish Ventures.

Workplaces are wonderful things, with people of all personality types forced to spend all day working in close proximity.

Some employers are placing more emphasis on ensuring they create teams of staff that work well together, with workplace personality testing estimated to be a $500m per year industry in the US.

Australian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop has met with a group of Australian entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley to discuss the various challenges and opportunities that surround the startup ecosystem.

The earlier you start thinking about diversity in your startup the easier it will be to naturally grow a diverse team in the long run, according to Nitro Founder Sam Chandler.

When Facebook Chief Operating Officer, Sheryl Sandberg, wrote in the Wall St Journal last week that it would take women 100 years to achieve gender equality in the C-suite unless corporates lift their game, she knew it would generate headlines.

The business buzzword for the past few years has undoubtedly been the cloud. It has been utilised by organisations of all size and across all industries in their pursuit to ensure flexibility, increased collaboration and security.

It's no surprise Silicon Valley has retained its place as the startup capital of the world in the recently released Global Startup Ecosystem Report. While the potential to replicate this environment in Australia is strong, a lack of growth has caused Sydney and Melbourne's startup scenes drop down a few places in the report's global rankings.

I think talent that can and will work anywhere in the world wants to come here [Australia]. So we do have a unique opportunity in front of us and I do feel confident with the new administration that we're going to seize it.

As you are probably aware, rhetoric around the number of women working in the Australian technology industry has heightened in recent months; however, recent ABS figures reveal that women still only represent 24 percent of the total technology industry workforce in Australia.

A new survey carried out by document productivity company Nitro has found that one third of businesses waste time on document review and approval every day, clogging up colleagues' desks and leaving workers idle. In fact businesses are losing up to 21% of their productivity as a result of poor document management.

Business editor Nick Webb travelled to sunny California for Dreamforce 2015 – the biggest software conference on the planet – to meet some of the Irish people making waves in Silicon Valley.

If you haven't decided yet which applications to install on your Windows 10 device, below you'll find a list of suggestions, but we're pretty sure that you'll want to download them immediately.

Despite the progress of the knowledge economy in the first world, businesses remain stuck on the concept of ‘productivity,' writes Sam Thorpe, Director of Product at Nitro.

Writer Simon Cocking interviews Nitro's new—and first ever—CFO, Peter Bardwick.

Nitro's CEO, Sam Chandler, sat down with the host of Startup Grind Sydney to discuss Nitro's past, present, and future.

Your startup needs to be free from unnecessary spending if it is ever going to thrive. It's not too late to get ahead in 2015 by prioritising costs that add real value and eliminating everything else!

Chandler says an IPO has always been a long-term plan for Nitro and the appointment of Peter Bardwick, formerly CFO of Rocket Fuel, would help achieve that goal when the timing was right.

Making millions and employing hundreds of staff is still not enough to help Sam Chandler forget the many sleepless nights he spent desperately trying to find a way to save his company that didn't involve firing most of his team.

Old business models and methods are tumbling as digital transformation changes the world.

Get out the birthday candles. June 30 is National E-Sign Day and the 15th birthday of the US National E-Sign Act, which declared paper signatures and electronic signatures equal under federal law.

Nitro Pro 10 continues to evolve at a steady pace, adding -- on the whole -- useful tools to its burgeoning feature set.

While each company brings different things to the table, Nitro's less-is-more approach is a highly viable alternative to enormous - and enormously expensive - options like Adobe and other vendors in the space.

In the past, actually editing a PDF document meant an expensive purchase, but now Nitro Pro brings all the advanced functionality you need within the reach of individuals and small businesses too.

More than 18 months since its last major release, Nitro has launched a major new version of its award-winning 'Acrobat alternative' tool for creating, editing and converting PDFs: Nitro Pro 10.

In the past few months, we've heard a lot of speculation why e-signature software has been so slow to gain traction — from legal and security issues to worker resistance and misunderstandings about how to use them.

What if I told you that one crucial business process has remained unchanged for hundreds, if not thousands of years, and costs businesses worldwide millions?

In the era of cloud computing and laptop, smartphone, and tablet use, there is really no reason for workers in any business to continue adopting poor productivity practices.

With all the talk about cloud computing and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), It's easy to overlook the desktops that have served us so faithfully over the years. But make no mistake, there's plenty of innovation still happening on the desktop.

In the past few months, we've heard a lot of speculation why e-signature software has been so slow to gain traction — from legal and security issues to worker resistance and misunderstandings about how to use them.

Mackenzie Strategic opted for Nitro Pro, which is a secure, scalable and comprehensive PDF solution for businesses of any size.

Australian technology start-ups continue to set up shop in and around San Francisco in search of more lucrative markets, a deeper talent pool and a dynamic investment culture. But as expenses escalate, is the area losing its lustre?

As CTO of cloud document productivity company Nitro, Tiho Bajic has learned that the most effective engineering culture isn't about long hours and constant sprints — it's about striking a smart balance.

“While these proposed changes are great for small business, the package will have little impact on start-ups and little impact on job creation, economic growth and Australia's position on the global stage," said Nitro CEO Sam Chandler.

Australian tech startups have welcomed a suite of employment and tax tweaks, but warned the Australian government is still failing to understand high-growth technology companies.

Values statements are seen as so central to corporate culture that most of us--at least in theory--are hired, fired, promoted or rewarded depending on how we meet them. What a shame, then, that most are codswallop.

In the past few months, we've heard a lot of speculation why e-signature software has been so slow to gain traction — from legal and security issues to worker resistance and misunderstandings about how to use them.

Besides efficient signature gathering, what else do e-signatures bring to the table? Plenty, says Nitro. They help companies meet customer and client demands for digital interactions and are also useful for mobile device-oriented interactions.

Much of the excitement around cloud technology is based on the door it opens to the quick adoption of other business intelligence tools. It is clearly one of the main forces driving the explosive growth of productivity software.

Nitro CEO Sam Chandler says the technology behind document management software is finally at a point where PDFs can take a back seat to other collaboration tools.

A new survey by Nitro, a document productivity company, and PDF Association has revealed three ways in which individuals and businesses can simplify procedures and effectively leverage the proper tools to improve document efficiency and enhance workplace productivity.

Sam Chandler says the growing Australian ecosystem has made a night and day difference to launching a tech company, nearly a decade after he founded Nitro in May 2005.

“The way a lot of people still work with documents today is really, unfortunately, the way they worked with documents in the 1990s. Many of us are still sharing documents like it is 1999."

Companies are throwing out big perks and bounties to employees who can help them lasso fresh talent or poach it away from the competition.

The How I Work series finds out how leading figures from tech, commerce, industry, the public sector and not-for-profit groups get things done so you can be inspired, too.

Although we're still waiting on the exact growth figures, anecdotal evidence backs the predictions many people made in January of last year that productivity software was going to be one of 2014's major technology trends.

More than a third of us are working with documents and collaborating the old fashioned way, via email, printing and editing, hand signing and scanning — you get the idea. 

Australian tech companies with names like Atlassian, Nitro, 99designs and Invoice2go have been growing rapidly since opening shop in the San Francisco area and are luring big time venture capitalists eager to ride the wave.

Document and workflow solutions provider Nitro has secured a contract with AIB to roll out a solution to over 1,000 employees, meaning it has reached the milestone of 500,000 customers globally.

The Australian technology start-up Nitro, which is making a push to crack Adobe's dominance in document creation, has hired three marketing, sales and science veterans including LinkedIn's former marketing head, as it looks to grow its brand awareness.

The Nitro culture is built on hard work and good times, indeed in a ‘happiness' study conducted of Dublin staff recently over 80pc of respondents used the word culture to explain why they love working for Nitro.

The reason for engineering culture's growing influence is very simple: the foundation of any successful technology company is a thriving development environment and infrastructure. 

2014 saw some great local startups thrive in the Australian marketplace, with many entrepreneurs reaping the rewards of developing a successful business.

If you want a fully featured PDF editor that's easy to use and cheaper than Acrobat XI Pro, Nitro PDF is not to be missed. Here's our Nitro Pro 9 review.

The PDF is a more powerful tool than many people realise, and is packed with an arsenal of built-in features to simplify digital document workflows.

Document productivity company Nitro… will beef up its San Francisco headquarters after raising $15M from Bay Area venture capitalists (VCs) in a bid to go after the big fish of document management, including Adobe and Citrix.

"It's been quite a long process. We wanted to raise money from the right firm. We spent a significant amount of time this year talking to VCs and trying to decide who we wanted to work with - these decisions are very important to us, more so than the money decision."

How can we turn Australia from a country that once rode on the sheep's back, and now rides a mining boom, into an innovation nation? Fresh from raising serious cash, Sam Chandler has some ideas.

Nitro is tracking toward a turnover of $30 million this year and over 50 per cent of the Fortune 500 are using its software. Mr. Chandler said the funding from Battery Ventures would help the ¬company grow and innovate. "For the first time we can paint a very big exciting picture on a blank canvas, and that's pretty cool," he said.

Chandler disagreed with the line of thinking that employee share options are only needed as a hiring incentive for very young startups that have a higher risk of folding. "It does not reflect an understanding of how equity compensation works in international talent markets," he said. "Companies will choose to hire people where the tax treatment is fair and equitable and it makes commercial sense, and people will choose to go to those same places."

"Battery Ventures has about a billion dollars under management so they've got plenty of depth when it comes to the investments they can make per company. Battery and Michael [Brown] have a lot of experience scaling companies from tens of million in revenue, which is where we are today, to hundreds of million in revenue."

Its latest funding round attracted US$15 million from Battery Ventures, which previously invested in companies such as Akamai, Blue Jeans, Freescale, Groupon, Nutanix, Skullcandy and Splunk, as well as less well-known names. Some Battery-backed companies have been acquired by top-tier enterprises such as Apple, Boeing, Cisco, IBM, Salesforce.com and Symantec.

"We've taken our time to think about doing this, and figure out how we wanted to it, and we've built up relationships with VCs over many years. And when we finally said 'you know what, this might be a really great idea and a great turbo-charger for the business', we were in a position to leverage those relationships."

Chandler says, "We need to take all the good stuff from Silicon Valley and repurpose it locally. While there are a lot of cities aspiring to become Silicon Valley, very few have a genuine shot at replicating the magic of the Valley – and Australia is one of them." Nitro's Director of Operations, Gina O'Reilly, echoes a similar view: "We need to create an ecosystem of our own. We can take the good from other environments like Silicon Valley, but we have to create our own flavour of it."

Michael Brown, General Partner at Battery, said: "Every business deals with documents and knows the pain points in effectively sharing them and using them to collaborate with others. Both offline and online, Nitro is helping to solve these universal problems. It's exciting to think that we've only just scratched the surface of this significant market opportunity and Battery is delighted to partner with the Nitro team to deliver on the company's vision of bringing smarter documents to everyone."

Tools like Nitro are absolutely a no-brainer for a modern, mobile, distributed and agile workforce. There's not much to say beyond that – Battery have made a wise choice.

"In terms of competing, we're carving out our own space, and we are already a profitable business so we know how to sustainably compete, but a bigger balance sheet always helps." says Chandler.

"For sharing, collaborating, and signing, we have a unique offering with powerful features to help companies work smarter; and you can get all these features from one Nitro solution, rather than multiple vendors,” Nitro CEO Sam Chandler said in an e-mail to Xconomy. “We are proud to have what we believe are the easiest to use and easiest to deploy products in the market today."

Sam Chandler, Nitro's Founder and CEO, said: "This investment allows us to bring our ‘Smart Documents' vision to life for organisations of all sizes. We want to help our customers close contracts faster, save money, collaborate more efficiently, modernise their document processes, and do it all more elegantly and securely than the old ways of paper and email. We're delighted to have a partner of Battery's caliber coming aboard."

Nitro will use the funds to accelerate growth, drive innovation and adoption of its new Nitro Cloud offering, and continue its international expansion with a particular emphasis on developing the EMEA team in Dublin.

"With 30 employees and a new larger Dublin office on One Grand Parade now in place, the expansion in Europe has coincided with over 50pc growth in EMEA customers since opening the Dublin office at the Web Summit last year."

Mr Gilmore said that Nitro was in “due diligence” to build the firm's first data centre outside the United States in Ireland. “We have the green-light from our board to do this. It will be a multimillion investment in a location to be decided,” Mr Gilmore said.

“Nitro's donation of technology equipment will help us improve that integration and better bring technology into the education of our students.”

Many companies have prioritized at least some of these architectural elements, but could benefit even more by going reactive from end to end. I believe there are three huge advantages to be gained from being proactive about reactive application engineering.

Chandler says as a member of the European Union, and because of the large number of successful startups based there, you can recruit 100 skilled people really quickly. Something Nitro is looking to do in Dublin over the next 12-18 months.

I think this work hard, play hard mantra – the ability to be driven and still have a laugh – is ultimately why I've chosen to work for an Aussie company in the Valley. It's challenging, it's exciting, it's rewarding…and it's all in good fun.

Gina O'Reilly, the San Francisco-based company's chief operations officer, said part of the goal with the 90-day contract is to establish a culture around constant performance measures and feedback in the minds of employees. The goal is to narrow the gap between what employees say they can achieve and what is actually delivered.

In principle, different rights management products work similarly to encrypt and manage access to documents, allowing the sender to maintain control of source files at all times. They allow users to manage documents and users from anywhere, authenticate every open or print attempt, and delegate user and document access.

As a rite of passage, each new Nitronaut is required to take a lap around the office pushing the beer cart, which is a great opportunity for them to meet the broader team while sharing a cold drink to kick off the weekend.

The philosophy is simple. If you take care of employees, they will take care of the company. “I care about everybody here,” said Johnson. “In addition, healthy, happy employees work better and, as a result, that helps the business. Happy employees help the bottom line.”

The 2014 Rising Star award adds to a string of accolades for Nitro this year, with Chandler taking the top gong at the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Southern Region Awards in the emerging category last month. Nitro also recently claimed the #2 spot in the JobAdvisor list of Australia's Coolest Tech Companies, beating out competition from a pool of more than 300 businesses.

Most smart professionals care more about finding a good culture fit in a company that values operational harmony and facilitates productivity. In other words, a workplace that allows them to get things done. But how can companies avoid the bureaucratic traps that so often stifle this efficiency?

What the judges said: “Competing against Adobe and gaining ground, mentoring approach to women, great corporate social responsibility program, and kitchen freebies!”

We don't have an HR department. We turned old-school HR on its head and instead created Employee Experience (EX), a global function whose sole responsibility is to help make Nitro the best possible place to work.

What the judges said: “Nitro is an exciting business with enormous potential. Sam Chandler has already achieved significant wins, taking market share from more dominant and established global competitors. Sam leads the business with a clear vision and strong execution. He has also been able to attract top talent to Nitro, despite competition from some of the world's leading technology companies.”

I've never understood why women are so under-represented in this industry, especially when you consider what we bring to the table in terms of complementary skills, not to mention our tremendous purchasing power.

Decide whether you want to be a small business or a high-growth company. They are different things. It's not that one is better than the other — they are simply different. One key difference between the two types of business is your attitude to investment, says Sam Chandler.

The internet has recently been abuzz with stories about security – or lack thereof. Nitro, provider of document productivity and collaboration solutions, has announced a new integration with Microsoft RMS (Rights Management Service), which will provide enhanced security for document workflows.

Master your streams of work before they master you with these simple but vital strategies. Work streams often grind to a halt when a key document needs to be signed off, so it makes sense to handle them in the speediest, most efficient way possible, argues Mimi Hoang.

Australia's innovation funding environment is akin to having a great primary school system but no secondary schools or universities. Start-ups need a better go from the public and private sector, including superannuation funds, argues Sam Chandler.

Australia's innovation funding environment is akin to having a great primary school system but no secondary schools or universities. Start-ups need a better go from the public and private sector, including superannuation funds, argues Sam Chandler.

There are many good things about Microsoft Windows, but the ability to work with PDF documents is not one of them. You can view documents easily enough, but you need to look elsewhere if you want to actually do something useful with them. A while ago, awesome DocumentSnap reader Sherri-Lee Mathers from Balsam Way Bookkeeping turned me on to a program that she relies on for her paperless practice: Nitro Pro.

It's a pleasant surprise when I meet Sam Chandler clutching a glass of the amber nectar that's shortly to be replaced by another... and one for the thirsty interviewer. Chandler has earned his drop. He says he's midway through conducting 42 interviews for his document editing and sharing company, Nitro.

Sure, you can edit that PDF—for $299, if you pay Adobe for Acrobat's Standard edition. I don't think so. And the Pro edition costs $449. Arguably the second-biggest name in PDF editing, Nitro is a venerable and mature editor with plenty to recommend. However, at $140, it's on the pricey side considering the many sub-$100 products in this field.

Document sharing solution provider Nitro wants to give Adobe, the biggest player in PDF software, some stiff competition. So says Sam Chandler, CEO of the San Francisco headquartered firm that he started in Australia back in 2005 and which now has more than 500,000 business customers and eight million monthly users.

The key to Nitro's rapid growth is a determination to give businesses a tool to use PDF documents as a platform for enterprise-wide teamwork, Chandler told me: “Our view was the majority of people around the world were just viewing documents rather than collaborating with them.”

Technology firm Nitro, which set up in Ireland last year, expects to at least double the number of jobs it initially hoped to create at its Dublin office. The company, which offers document productivity products to rival Adobe and DocuSign, said it planned to create more than 100 jobs at its European, Middle East and Africa headquarters in Ireland, with the potential to expand that up to 150 positions.

Nitro has been leading the "Acrobat alternative" crowd for a long time now, with regular feature upgrades and offerings that keep setting it apart. With many great features available through its free product options, it's perfect for casual PDF makers while delivering the more advanced goods that make power users happy to pay to upgrade.