At Adobe, we’ve been innovating on digital documents for decades. Today, we deliver the most comprehensive eSigning portfolio, from digital signatures in Adobe Acrobat to Adobe EchoSign.

• 50 million agreements have been signed on the EchoSign platform, which is now accelerating at a rate of more than 3 million agreements per month.
• Organizations using EchoSign include more than 100 banks as well as companies like Citrix, Foursquare, Groupon, KIA Motors, Marketo, Netapp, Ricoh, Time Warner Cable, TiVo, and more.
• More than 1.8 million customers are using Adobe Acrobat digital signatures across the Federal government, healthcare and pharmaceuticals, financial services, and more.
• 30 million users are signing their personal documents with Adobe Reader, which is deployed across 800 million PCs and 300 million mobile devices worldwide.

But there’s still a great deal of work to do.  According to our research, less than 10 percent of all contracts in North America are signed electronically. This means important documents are being printed and signed the old fashioned way, which slows business down, creates risk and can be error prone. Whether it’s a sales contract being sent from Salesforce.com, or a new employee onboarding document that’s part of a Taleo workflow, we don’t think companies should be printing, faxing, or “over-nighting” these critical documents. That’s where eSignatures can have a huge impact.

LOOKING FORWARD

To help our customers and partners plan their eSignature implementation initiatives, we are revealing our top-level roadmap for friction-free business with a new digital document platform. In the next 30 days, we’ll deliver two key updates:  EchoSign for Salesforce v14, as well as a major new EchoSign winter release. We’ll provide more detail here in the next few weeks, so stay tuned.  More broadly, we are delighted to share how we will innovate over the next 6 to 12 months across three key areas: advancing security, ease of use, and expanding our cloud capabilities.

SECURITY & IDENTITY

Digital Signature Support. In June 2012, EchoSign became the first solution provider to digitally sign and cryptographically seal documents signed through the EchoSign service. The digital seal provides persistent evidence of the authenticity of the signed document, and provides visual tamper evidence when viewed in Acrobat or Reader. We’re seeing increased adoption of Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) smartcards or tokens across government, healthcare, pharmaceutical, finance, and more – smartcards that can be used for digitally signing documents. So I’m delighted to announce that Adobe will introduce first class support for digital signatures in the EchoSign service, leveraging Acrobat and Reader. This means that Adobe EchoSign will be the only cloud-based service platform that delivers both digital signatures and electronic signatures, meeting global regulatory compliance and high-security requirements where digital signatures are needed.

Digital Rights Management. Documents transacted through the EchoSign platform frequently contain sensitive and confidential information – be it Personally Identifiable Information (PII), Personal Health Information (PHI), pricing and deal terms, or salary information. The information contained in these documents must be secured throughout its lifespan to ensure that it does not get into the wrong hands. So today we are taking the document security offered by the EchoSign platform to a new frontier: we are announcing digital rights protection for all your PDF documents that are signed using EchoSign. With this new protection, your organization will be able to control access to your critical business documents after the documents have been signed, no matter where they are stored. We are able to deliver this capability thanks to the wide-spread adoption of Adobe Reader, which is used on more than 800 million devices worldwide. This new capability will let companies control and audit access to PDF documents already sent or downloaded, enable advanced watermarking, digitally “shred” expired documents, and more.

USER EXPERIENCE

EchoSign is the industry leader on ease of use. For example, EchoSign is 30 percent more efficient than the leading competitor. EchoSign has a net promoter score of 57, whereas the next-best leading competitor has a score of 53. (Source: Independent research across more than 290 active eSignature users, commission by Adobe, Sept. 2013).   And, Adobe EchoSign is the No. 1 rated eSignature solution by community users on the Salesforce.com AppExchange:

We are taking this to the next level with a deep bet on mobile and HTML5 experiences. Starting with the 6.7 release next month, we’re introducing a next-generation signing experience that is even easier to use. The UI will also feature new send and forms-authoring tools that support drag‐and-drop file upload, field templates, workflow templates, and redesigned document management and administrative pages. We’re also making forms more adaptable. With EchoSign, you’ll be able to create reusable form templates that include field definitions, locations and field properties that can be applied to any document. And, you’ll be able to make form field templates to place EchoSign signature fields on the document, as well as ensure the correct number of signers is applied to the document.

We’re also pushing the boundaries on mobile support. EchoSign is the only signature service to offer a widely deployed offline-signing solution for iOS. Based on customer feedback, we will be extending this unique capability to the Android platform as well as the PC and Mac OS environments through Adobe Reader.  So if you’re just signing a school permission slip or getting a multi-million dollar deal signed from your mobile device, EchoSign will continue to be the easiest solution out there.

NEXT-GENERATION CLOUD PLATFORM

Adobe EchoSign is deployed across multiple datacenters with full support for Disaster Recovery, PCI and HIPAA compliance, all housed in SSAE 16 Type 2 certified datacenters. We provide a uniquely global solution, supporting signers in more than 180 countries around the world. Today, we are announcing plans to deliver local datacenter support in both Europe and Australia in 2014, as well as our intention to enter Adobe EchoSign into the U.S. government’s FedRAMP certification program. Respectively, these are critical for organizations that require data sovereignty as well as the highest levels of cloud certification.  The majority of our customers are integrating EchoSign with existing business applications: Apttus, Box, eOriginal, Evernote, Salesforce.com, Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Office 365, NetSuite, Oracle, SAP, Xactly and more. We will be providing a deeper level of innovation across these integrations, and introducing powerful new REST API support as part of the 6.7 release for developers worldwide.

This is how eSigning should be – intuitive, ubiquitous, adaptable and secure, making business friction-free so you can close deals faster and more confidently. It should come from a vendor you trust. And it should work with your existing systems. We are excited to be investing in the future, and setting the standard for what an electronic signature platform should deliver.

Join us at DreamForce 2013, on Wednesday, November 20 at 9 a.m. to hear how our customers are currently using EchoSign to improve their business agility during our customer panel with Groupon, Electronic Arts, Conway and United Healthcare, or stop by our booth on the floor, booth N1407, Moscone Center North.

Follow Jon Perera on Twitter: @jon_perera

Some of the happiest surprises here at Adobe are the results we realize from using our own products.

Our team members want performance, value, engagement, and experiences that make their jobs productive and rewarding, just like our customers. To make that happen, we’ve been encouraging teams throughout Adobe—such as sales, procurement, and people resources—to integrate Adobe EchoSign into their e-signature workflows.

So far, the results have been spectacular:

• Procurement has slashed $250,000 from its operating overhead
• Vendor contract completion is three times faster
• People resources has cut printing costs 80% and shipping costs by $35,000

Many of my colleagues are impressed at how well automating signature processes improves productivity while it cuts costs.  We also had a really easy time integrating EchoSign with our existing technology. The Adobe EchoSign API integrated with our legacy system in only three weeks, using only one analyst, one developer, and a few software QA people.

Our sales department uses Apttus enterprise contract management system (ECM), powered by Salesforce.com to manage nondisclosure agreements. The sales team can leverage EchoSign e-sign workflows within the ECM, generating clear audit trails to expedite workflows and verify the legality of agreements. The forthcoming companywide rollout and integration of ECM with Adobe EchoSign will make contracting even faster and more reliable.

Learn more about Adobe and the benefits we yield from Adobe EchoSign by clicking here.

Customers have been telling us that Adobe EchoSign’s ease of use and multi-device accessibility has cut their contract execution time in half, but that hasn’t left us resting on our laurels.  Today we announced an update to the Adobe EchoSign e-signing offering that includes an updated offline iOS app and other new features that enhance mobility and usability for e-signing contracts, agreements and other critical business documents.  We also announced plans for a multi-million dollar data center facility based in Chicago.  The new facility, which will come online this summer, will help to increase performance and availability and will complement the existing data center in Dallas.  Collectively, the enhancements and new data center (along with the recently announced EchoSign for SalesForce version 13) will help us continue to meet our customers’ high expectations and support the growing demand from companies who want to accelerate their business processes, improve tracking and centralize the management of signed agreements.

The new EchoSign features will help further reduce sales cycles, increase workflow productivity, and deliver an engaging user experience.  Headlining the new features is Adobe EchoSign for iOS version 2, which will allow users to get business done whether they’re online or offline plus have access to all their critical documents regardless of location.  They can sign documents offline and automatically synchronize them back to the cloud with their iPad.  Other new features include real-time calculations, where users can build fields into their contracts which get automatically calculated based on a formula or rule; improved document readability, with significantly improved image quality and performance; and better alignment with the customer’s brand and business processes when getting documents signed.

More detailed information about the updates to Adobe EchoSign can be found in the full press release here.