Bruce Chizen, CEO / Adobe

Chizen, who joined Adobe in 1994 after stints at HBO, Mattel Electronics and Microsoft, engineered what may be the most interesting tech deal in the past few years—a pending $3.4 billion buyout of Macromedia. That acquisition is “definitely my baby,” says Chizen, who is well thought of by the Silicon Valley crowd, where his Brooklyn-born-and-bred style and sensibility set him apart.

“Within five minutes of meeting him, you know he&'s a New York street-tough guy who has a sense of humor,” says Intuit Chairman Bill Campbell.

Campbell, who was at Claris when the company brought Chizen aboard in 1987, says Chizen combines sales and marketing savvy with an acquired appreciation of technological niceties. And that appreciation is important at a company founded by Chuck Geschke and John Warnock, now co-chairmen. “You can&'t exist at Adobe unless you have the respect of the engineering culture,” Campbell says.

Geschke agrees, saying Chizen has good rapport with Adobe President and COO Shantanu Narayen and has won the respect of the developers. “Bruce also knows what he knows and knows what he doesn&'t know,” Geschke says.

Chizen&'s marketing moxy and admiration for technology also will be important in carrying out an ambitious agenda. He says the essence of the merger is to create an engagement layer technology platform, combining the Adobe Reader and PDF file format with Macromedia&'s Flash Player and related file formats. “That combo could be a way in which we all engage and interact with information across all sorts of devices, from PCs through mobile phones, through computers or HDTV,” he says.

Even skeptics agree that San Jose, Calif.-based Adobe and San Francisco-based Macromedia together have wider distribution and deeper penetration than mighty Microsoft. Adobe&'s PDF reader is ubiquitous, as is Macromedia&'s Flash Player. Most people have both on their PCs and Macs and even other devices, often without knowing it.

“Macromedia certainly gives them scale, and in today&'s software business, scale is becoming more and more important,” says Symantec CEO John Thompson, another Silicon Valley executive who is bullish on the deal and on his friend Chizen. “Let&'s not kid ourselves: We&'re in an industry with slowing growth rates, which leads to consolidation. If you&'re a leader in one area and consolidate into adjacent segments, you can create a competitive advantage.” Chizen&'s sales DNA surfaces at times. When asked about Adobe&'s other initiative to unseat an entrenched Quark in the professional publishing market with Adobe InDesign, he rattles off wins: Hearst, Meredith Corp. “Just about every major publisher with the exception of Time Inc. has either announced their intent to move or has already moved,” he says.

Adobe logged $1.9 billion in revenue over the past four quarters, which is nothing to sneeze at, and Macromedia will add $449 million more to the top line. But “Macro-dobe” also faces competition on several fronts from Microsoft, which has honed in on nearly every market Adobe and Macromedia target. Microsoft historically took on Adobe in fonts and low-end publishing packages, but now has plans for a PDF competitor and a rival to Macromedia&'s Flash tool.

Thompson says Chizen&'s makeup will do him well. “Bruce is unflappable,” he says. “He won&'t let the hype around Microsoft or the noise in the market cause him to do something that is illogical or irrational.”