Adobe System Incorporated announced a few hours back that they have acquired EchoSign (see their blog post), the Palo Alto based company offering electronic signature solution. According to the company, EchoSign’s solution will be part of the Adobe document exchange platform for exchanging documents for universal access, review and approval. The solution will also be integrated with with Adobe’s other services like SendNow (for sending large files), FormsCentral (for form creation) and CreatePDF (for online PDF creation).
Echosign with approximately 25 employees (according to LinkedIn) and $8.5 Million in total funding competes directly with other companies like Docusign, RightSignature, E-Lock, ContractPal, etc.. With more than 3 Million users, EchoSign is part of the new age companies focussing on paperless offices and green initiatives. In fact, EchoSign uses 100% NativeEnergy wind-powered renewable energy certificates to offset all power used by our servers and hardware. The company boasts some impressive statistics like
- Average time to signature = 42 Mins
- Transactions each month with their e-signature = $500 Million
etc.. They have also partnered with companies like Salesforce.com, NetSuite, SAP, WebEx and Zoho. Their solution is also well integrated with Google Apps / Google Docs, NetSuite, SAP Sourcing, Oracle CRM On Demand, eFax, DropBox, Evernote, Box.net, SugarCRM, Xobni and SpringCM.
Adobe already has Adobe eSignatures which was sort of competing with solutions like EchoSign. Adobe’s strategy with EchoSign is not immediately clear. May be they are interested in the technology behind EchoSign’s powerful platform. Also, it is not clear what will happen to the deep integrations EchoSign has with Google Apps and other cloud based services. Adobe is not known for its openness and interoperability. We will have to wait and see their strategy with EchoSign. It will also be interesting to see how DocuSign‘s strategy after this news.
Thanks for some actual commentary – when most of the online media outlets today have just been reguritiating the same talking points from Adobe’s press release and offering no views or value of their own.