Who is Really the Electronic Signature Market Leader?

Measuring Market Leaders in the SaaS Market

The other day, someone asked me “How do you know you are the Market Leader in the SaaS ESIGN Market?” Good question because in a new market nearly everyone claims they are the market leader.

What’s interesting is that with SaaS offers, it is actually fairly easy to come up with a proxy for market share by using the same tools that Web sites use. It’s a little more involved because we are not measuring your “.com” site. For example, DocuSign’s service is actually on a different server farm and is at DocuSign.net so it’s a bit more complicated, but attainable.

A Proxy for Market Share – Visits to a SaaS Application

At least in terms of overall activity, ‘visits’ to a SaaS Application online is a good proxy for market share. People do not visit a login page for an online ESIGN tool for fun. They go to log in and sign or send.

Companies like Quantcast, Alexa and Compete.com provide measurement estimates of traffic to sites. Most dismiss Alexa because they use a Web browser toolbar to count visits and this only works with certain browsers, only for users using the toolbar, only focuses on rankings of 100,000 and above (our competition doesn’t show up), and can be easily gamed. Quantcast does not have sufficient data yet. So, for today, Compete.com is the best source having the best data.

Using Compete.com to compare the total visits to the top 9 SaaS ESIGN applications is a fair proxy for measuring market share of these ESIGN vendors. The data is pretty amazing, and shows what we in the industry suspect. The overall market is growing and not surprisingly, more offerings are coming into the market.

The graph below shows the relative size of the top 9 SaaS ESIGN vendors for October 2009:

Here are the same 9 SaaS ESIGN vendors from September 2008:

First, my disclaimer! This is only a PROXY for market share information. There are variables that are likely not taken into account such as API calls, etc. But as a group, the data applies the same to all of these companies.

So what does this data say? Actually, it tells us some very interesting things:

From 9/08 through 9/09, the market has expanded.

• Overall application visits have increased 286%.
• More companies have entered the market.

This data is consistent with what we’re seeing at DocuSign. Our business is up over 350% over this same period.

DocuSign’s market share grew over the past 12 months from 57% to 70% —yes, we’ve had a great year!

This data shows that 2009 has been a big year in ESIGN, and we believe 2010 is gearing up to be even bigger. Want to check out the ESIGN market yourself? Visit www.compete.com and compare different company’s SaaS application sites total visits. This will show you the ‘activity’ level on a comparable basis.

It’s clear e-signing is quickly becoming the preferred method of conducting business. At DocuSign, we strive to give you the best electronic signature services possible with the most rich array of functionality so you can quickly get the signatures you need to close the deal. We make it fast and easy to DocuSign from anywhere, anytime.

Whether it’s sending a simple Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA) or a complex multi-page, multi-signer sales contract, we work very hard to give you the best e-sign services available. We’re listening. And here’s what we’ve heard so far:

The introduction of DocuSign into our collections process significantly improved DSO contributing to access to over $1M in additional working capital on an annualized basis. – Brian Frank, Director of Global Enterprise Operations, LinkedIn

DocuSign allows us to quickly generate documents and distribute them to the customer for execution and then get them moved on to the supplier to book the energy. It immediately goes from the customer’s office to the supplier so there is a very little gap in time for the market to move. DocuSign helps the customer lock in a rate at a low price and ensures that it gets preserved even if the market is moving quickly. – Scott Chilton, President & Managing Partner, Community Energy, LP

Just by the very nature of how much easier DocuSign is to get a document signed, get it completed and get it archived, DocuSign allows us to go from a couple of days or even a week, down to literally hours to get a contract executed. – Jim Roberson, President & Co-Founder, Drawloop Technologies

DocuSign significantly improved the company’s workflow cycle. With DocuSign, you can always look at the status in real-time and know if the contract is still out there. It makes your job a lot easier, keeping track of what contracts you sent out and what hasn’t come back yet. – Tressa Morgan, Sales Operations Database and Client Support Manager, EDGAR Online

The best part is documents could be signed in literally minutes versus months. I now have complete visibility. With a few clicks, I know who hasn’t signed. – Mike Machado, CRM Manager, Yamaha Commercial Audio

It seems the word is out! Using the Internet, not the Interstate, to get your documents signed is faster, less expensive and becoming the norm in many business segments. It really is inevitable! It will be interesting to see what the data is at this time NEXT YEAR. Stay tuned!

TG