Welcome, Adobe! What took you so long?

Last Friday, Adobe, the largest proponent of PKI based digital signature software, announced a CLOUD based electronic signature solution that allows users to upload PDF documents and send them for eSignature – no confusing PKI or Software to deal with! This is a dramatic departure from the Acrobat Software Centric PKI Digital Signature approach that they have been pushing for so long.

We at DocuSign are happy to see Adobe join the market for Cloud based electronic signing – a market that we created more than 6 years ago. Adobe’s dramatic shift from software oriented PKI certificate based signing signals what we’ve known for a long time: PKI & software based electronic signing is just too complicated. Adobe’s endorsement of SaaS based electronic signing, is an indicator that certificate based document signing is not the best electronic signing technology.

While Adobe’s efforts are headed the right direction to the clouds, their first solution is far short of any being able to have any meaningful business impact. Their customers will discover that merely uploading a PDF and sending it to an email to sign is just not enough to satisfy mainstream business process. The Adobe offer actually does less than our own ‘DocuSign Lite’ sending tool that we offer for free from our web site. At least with DocuSign Lite, you can eSign on the dotted line – you can’t with Adobe.

What DocuSign has learned over the years has made us the Trusted Standard in the Electronic Signature market. We learned that in order to have REAL BUSINESS ROI, you need to deliver much more than just a signature. You need to provide an entire suite of capabilities that work seamlessly together to enable businesses to manage the whole transaction including authentication, workflow, eforms, and integration – and you need to hide complex technology behind a familiar user experience.

Adobe certainly CAN develop a full function esignature platform – they are a $17B company with millions of users. This is also not the first time another company liked/copied our approach — DocuSign has been showing the way in this market over the years, and we’ll keep leading and innovating this market as we have always done. Adobe can even leverage some of the capabilities they have in their underlying server software called “Livecycle,” which is currently used to run their Cloud ESIGN service. Their biggest internal struggle will probably be how their Cloud based model impacts their ability to sell their Lifecycle server software, which sells for hundreds of thousands of dollars. This makes me wonder if they can ‘afford’ to provide a real business solution that does enough to have a business impact as a Cloud based service – especially a free one.

Adobe, we’re glad you’ve joined us in the Cloud. Perhaps we can work together sometime.

– Tom Gonser