Gonser

Last Friday, we reported on Adobe's new offering in the electronic signatures arena, a move that we suggested could strike some fear into the hearts of the folks behind DocuSign. But the Seattle electronic signature startup is hardly running scared. In fact, founder and vice president of product strategy Tom Gonser said in a follow-up statement that his initial reaction to Adobe's new offering was: "What took them so long?"

Readers on TechFlash debated whether DocuSign had a chance to compete against its much larger competitor, and I am sure this debate would make for yet another interesting example of "The Innovator's Dilemma" which Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen described at today's Technology Alliance luncheon in Seattle.

At this point, however, Gonser thinks that DocuSign has the upper hand. I was unable to reach the DocuSign executives last week when the Adobe news broke, so I was glad to get some feedback from Gonser today. Here's what he had to say:

"Seeing Adobe enter the market validates what we’ve known for years—this is a huge market, and our SaaS-based product delivers tremendous value very quickly. Seeing Adobe abandon software-based electronic signature software in favor of this new service-based approach illustrates the rapid decline of software-based PKI digital signature solutions, which are too complex and costly to administer and manage. As the trusted leader in SaaS-based electronic signatures with over four million users, and the established standard in important markets like Financial Services and Real Estate (where the National Association for Realtors (NAR) has named DocuSign as the exclusive provider to the entire REALTOR market), we have a sizeable market lead over Adobe.

If you compare our service to the new Adobe service, it is immediately obvious that we have a sizable product lead also. DocuSign provides much more than just a signature. We also provide authentication, workflow, data collection and collaboration—all critical components of a business-class e-signature platform. The Adobe service has none of this. So we see this announcement as the best of both worlds. A large company just validated the market we created more than six years ago is huge, and it offers a solution that is not competitive. The awareness created by Adobe will accelerate DocuSign’s business even more."