Today, we announced our latest innovations in on-demand electronic signature solutions, with the release of the DocuSign version 10.1. This version of our award-winning e-signature service offers unique features and functionality designed to support workflow and productivity including automation of form fields and other workflow enhancements to simplify the user experience.

ESIGNControl, a custom DocuSign application specifically designed for Apple® iPhone users by Smart Mobile Solutions, further extends this rich feature set. DocuSign, combined with ESIGNControl, supercharges sales teams, real estate professionals, mortgage brokers, and business development and operational professionals who rely on the DocuSign e-signature service to close deals online in minutes.

Gartner predicts that worldwide Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) revenue will exceed $14 billion for the enterprise application markets by 2013, up from $7.5 billion in 2009.* Organizations of all sizes are deploying affordable, on-demand solutions like DocuSign to automate core business functions, reduce costs and increase employee productivity. Whether it’s a simple NDA or a complex global sales agreement requiring multi-party signatures, DocuSign helps companies operate greener, faster and more profitably by removing the hurdles associated with the signing process and by offering more ways for users to access and complete their transactions online.

This release of DocuSign version 10.1 adds more sophisticated capabilities that make it faster and easier than ever to get documents signed online, and to share data with other core business applications. DocuSign is creating an e-signature ecosystem that makes it possible for organizations across all industries to close deals in the cloud and operate more efficiently. – Tom Gonser, founder and vice president of product strategy at DocuSign

DocuSign Version 10.1 At-a-Glance

Automatic Conversion of Adobe® PDF Form Fields. Now, when uploading Adobe PDF forms into the DocuSign system, the service automatically recognizes and converts all PDF form fields—including text boxes, radio button groups, drop downs and check boxes—along with their attributes, directly into secure DocuSign fields that can be assigned to specific recipients. These fields can be manipulated without any additional software, and the forms can be saved as templates in the DocuSign online forms library and shared with all account users.

DocuSign for Salesforce New Enhancements. Salesforce users now have access to all functionality DocuSign offers from inside Salesforce. Salesforce users can use DocuSign to send any document for signature as easily as sending email from Salesforce. Unique to DocuSign is the ability to drag and drop form fields associated with Salesforce data directly into documents, enabling these documents to collect data during the signing process and automatically update Salesforce in real time. This new capability eliminates rekeying of information and dramatically streamlines the sales process.

In addition, users can set up DocuSign for Salesforce accounts and manage users within the Salesforce application through the new DocuSign Admin Tab. Users can be up and running in a matter of minutes with no new user interface to learn. These new capabilities are expected to be released through the Salesforce Spring Update on March 6, 2010. DocuSign for Salesforce customers include Acteva, Community Energy, Drawloop, EDGAR® Online, LinkedIn, Yamaha and others.

Expanded Capabilities with ESIGNControl for the Apple iPhone. ESIGNControl enables DocuSign clients to use their Apple iPhone to access, send, sign and manage electronic documents. It is a powerful tool for managers to track their sales through robust reporting functionality. ESIGNControl is available today for download from iTunes® and a variety of other Web sites.

The iPhone is quickly becoming a must-have business productivity tool and ESIGNControl makes it easy for DocuSign clients to maximize efficiencies when away from the office. ESIGNControl was developed for the iPhone and thoroughly tested for performance. This new application offers a fast, convenient and mobile method to use DocuSign from any iPhone. -Tony Tonchev, founder of Smart Mobile Solutions and creator of the ESIGNControl application

ESIGNControl is a DocuSign transaction remote control that lets users manage documents sent for e-signature from any iPhone. ESIGNControl offers a rich feature set that makes it fast and easy for DocuSign users to:

• Send a document for signature straight from your iPhone
• Conveniently view, track and access sent documents
• Easily send, revise and resend documents for eSignature
• Quickly access document signing status, envelope details, archived documents and history
• Share easy-to-read graphical reports that even shows transaction times
• Electronically sign a document from anywhere, anytime
• Remotely log in to the DocuSign Console

These powerful new features within the DocuSign eSignature Service, further demonstrate DocuSign’s leadership in the ESIGN market. DocuSign currently commands more than 70 percent of the SaaS-based electronic signature services market and recently surpassed 58 million signature events. The company has experienced accelerated growth of more than 300 percent over the previous year and serves more than 20,000 customers ranging across all markets. In 2009, DocuSign delivered more than 480 customer-driven features while maintaining 99.993 percent system availability over the past 28 months.**

Pricing and Availability of DocuSign Electronic Signature Solutions

DocuSign for Salesforce is scheduled to be available March 6 with additional product information available online. Salesforce users will be able to download the DocuSign for Salesforce application at no charge at the Appexchange.

ESIGNControl is available now from iTunes for $2.99.

* Gartner report “Market Trends: Software as a Service, Worldwide, 2008-2013, Update,” November 4, 2009. http://www.gartner.com/resId=1221513 .
** DocuSign, http://www.docusign.com/news_and_events/press_releases/2010-01-27.php.

If you can save time, you’ll have opportunities to achieve greater work / life balance – a must during the busy holiday season or anytime of year!

Don’t take our word that electronic signature can result in HUGE time savings – our customers across various business channels, including real estate, have shared their stories:

Acteva Event Management has reduced the time to create contracts by one-third and has accelerated the contract signing process from 48 hours to 15 minutes. Generating contracts now takes fewer than 10 minutes compared to 30 minutes using the old process.

LinkedIn reduced its time to invoice from 25 days to only 5 days with DocuSign for Salesforce.

DocuSign for Salesforce enabled Drawloop Technologies to start the contract signing process sooner and reduced turnaround time from days to hours.

EDGAR Online leveraged DocuSign for Salesforce to reduce the signing process of contract from weeks to less than 48 hours.

For example, in real estate, user surveys indicate DocuSign saves the average REALTOR® about 6 hours per week – nearly an entire day. How? They no longer have to babysit the fax machine or drive out to get a “wet” signature. Additionally, because they no longer require that customers find fax machines to sign, they see a huge customer satisfaction increase.

Using DocuSign’s Intelligent Document Recognition™ (IDR) and Templates, Aaron Wheeler of Oakville Properties can generate documents in TWO minutes.

Electronic signature services from DocuSign saves you time, cuts operational costs, enables you to close deals faster and increases your customer satisfaction rates, no matter what business you’re in.

This all adds up to more opportunity to achieve your work / life balance!

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

Since 2002, Drawloop Technologies, Inc. has become one of the leading on-demand document automation solution providers on the market. How does electronic signature from DocuSign enable Drawloop to dramatically reduce its contract turnaround time?

Drawloop allows customers to take native files or original source files to quickly and automatically create sales quotes, proposals, presentations, sales contracts and other documents within Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint and PDF files. Drawloop’s customers can custom package these documents to meet their needs as well as wrap rules around documents and merge data quickly.

Drawloop’s Business Challenge

Drawloop’s core offering of document automation technology needed a final piece of the puzzle to enable the full cycle of contract management. Drawloop also wanted an electronic signature solution for internal Drawloop use as well as a technology partner.

According to Jim Roberson, co-founder and president of Drawloop:

You might automate your quote, your proposal, your marketing collateral and so on during the sales process and none of that – with the exception of maybe an NDA at the beginning of the process – typically needs an executed signature. So you’ve done all of this automation, but when you get to the last step of the sales process, which is how you get paid and how you close business, you’re missing a key element of the automation if you don’t offer that electronic contract execution at the end of that process.

The Solution? DocuSign for Salesforce with Dynamic Documents

Drawloop chose DocuSign due to DocuSign’s robust electronic signature workflow technology:

We see DocuSign as the last step of document automation – and one of the most critical. It was natural for us because for a lot of documents that we automate, merge and package, the next step is to get those executed and that’s where we found a nice fit and synergy with our service and the DocuSign electronic signature service.

Drawloop: integrated its solution into DocuSign to allow its salespeople to pull data directly from Salesforce

Salesforce: auto-populated e-signature enabled contracts and directly receives missing or updated contract information

DocuSign: managed routing for multiple signers and captured data during the signing process, once the appropriate data and signature fields are merged

DocuSign is substantially unique from other options because most of the time if you’re missing data you need to pick up the phone, call them, email them and try to get all of that data before you can send it out for signing. With DocuSign, this hassle is totally eliminated.

What was the result for Drawloop? Considerably reducing turnaround from days to hours as well as enabling Drawloop’s sales team to start the contract execution process sooner. One of the greatest benefits of implementing DocuSign for Salesforce with Dynamic Documents includes improved organization, automation and archiving of contracts.

DocuSign allowed Drawloop:

• To close contracts within hours instead of days or even a week
• To eliminate scanning of contracts and manual data entry back into Salesforce, a process that introduced data loss and extra manual steps
• To gather data from customers and provide this information directly within the appropriate fields within the DocuSign contract

While electronic signature helps Drawloop get documents signed faster, only DocuSign for Salesforce allows Drawloop to get documents signed faster with improved data workflow. Click for the complete Drawloop case study.

In six years, LinkedIn has become the world’s largest professional network with 50 million members in over 200 countries on 7 continents. How does electronic signature from DocuSign provide value to a company like LinkedIn?

LinkedIn helps over 40% of the Fortune 100 companies sift through the content-rich profiles of passive job candidates to find the right people for their organization.

Brian Frank, LinkedIn Director of Global Operations and a panelist at our Executive Customer Council (ECC) in September, stated:

If you’re looking for that hard to find person, that salesperson who’s a superstar, the person who’s already employed as the top performer at his or her company, LinkedIn helps you find better talent faster.

LinkedIn’s Business Challenge

LinkedIn, a leader in Enterprise Web 2.0 technology, was also an early adopter of electronic signature technology but encountered significant challenges surrounding the collection of customer information key to invoicing and collections.

Without the correct information – purchase order number, billing and shipping information, user information, and so on – contracts that ended up on the desktops of accounts receivable staff meant days of follow up and hunting down the proper information before they could ask for the money.

How much time did tracking down this information take? On average, this cost LinkedIn an extra 25 days to the billing cycle.

The Solution? Logical Workflow with DocuSign for Salesforce with Dynamic Documents Powered by Drawloop

Designed to integrate directly into Salesforce, DocuSign works together with software created by its partner, Drawloop, to offer LinkedIn’s salespeople what Frank calls a logical workflow:

• The LinkedIn Salesperson: selects specific clauses or words necessary to a specific Opportunity and the system automatically creates a contract
• Drawloop: takes the data from the Opportunity in Salesforce: customer name and data from the product section in the Opportunity. Drawloop then merges this information into a DocuSign template to create an assembled PDF document
• DocuSign: adds flexibility to capture data on the customer side during the electronic signing process

With DocuSign for Salesforce with Dynamic Documents conveniently creates a contract to send to a customer – salespeople do not need to sign into another system. The system also provides an enhanced layer of security into the process, by creating a non-modifiable, locked PDF that prevents anyone from creating their own documents and adding it into the system.

“DocuSign is fast, easy and seamless. It removed the hassle of getting a copy back to the customer, tracking data and knowing who approves what. The thing that’s really special is that it captures those terms in the contract cycle that no one ever thinks about. Those terms are very important to a variety of different internal stakeholders at the company.” – Brian Frank, Director Global Enterprise Operations, LinkedIn

What was the result for LinkedIn? Considerably reducing DSO, or days sales outstanding, from an average of 25 days to FIVE days, an 80% decrease, and improving cash flow:

The introduction of DocuSign into our collections process significantly improved DSO contributing to access to over $1,000,000 in additional working capital on an annualized basis.

While eSignatures helps LinkedIn get documents signed faster, only DocuSign for Salesforce with Dynamic Documents allows LinkedIn to get documents signed faster, correctly. Click for the complete LinkedIn case study.