Nitro’s latest PDF tools could simplify your life (if your life revolves around PDFs)

The future is in the cloud, but many companies still have their feet firmly planted in paperwork.

For these companies, Nitro has a new offering that could be seriously useful in connecting 21st-century cloud documents with 20th-century PDFs and Office documents.

Tomorrow, Nitro plans to release the latest version of its desktop application, Nitro Pro 9. The app integrates with Nitro Cloud, a service the company launched in beta earlier this year, to enable real-time document sharing, signing, and collaboration with Nitro’s online markup tools. Pro 9 users can track document versions and collaboration history, reverting to an earlier version if necessary.

“We’re the only company that we know of that’s offering collaboration and e-signing as a hybrid solution between the desktop and the cloud,” Nitro CEO Sam Chandler told VentureBeat in an interview last week.

Additionally, Nitro Pro users can convert Word, Excel, and other files to PDFs (and back again). They can also create PDFs from multiple source documents; convert Microsoft Outlook emails, folders, and attachments to PDFs; and analyze inconsistencies between document versions with the compare tool, among other features.

Nitro Cloud beta users uploaded more than three million documents last month, even though the service was only available through the browser, according to Chandler. He expects that number to rise significantly this month, when the 400,000 companies (including half of the Fortune 500) using Nitro Pro upgrade to the latest version.

Despite the company’s significant user base, Chandler sees a lot of opportunity for continued growth. He cited Gartner research that suggests only one percent of documents are signed electronically.

“If you live in San Francisco or New York — well, we’re in a bit of a bubble,” he said. “Clearly, most businesses are still working the old-fashioned way.”

Last year, Nitro partnered with Chinese technology firm Lenovo, which sells its laptops with Nitro software pre-installed.

Nitro is headquartered in San Francisco with 120 employees worldwide. It raised a $3.5 million funding round from Starfish Ventures in May 2012, followed by an additional $3 million round this past May.