Leaders
AdobeFeatured Vendor
DocuSign
InfoCert
Major Players
airSlate
Box
Citrix
Conga
Dropbox
Namirial
OneSpan
PandaDoc
Zoho
An electronic signature, also known as esignature, is a legally agreed upon replacement for uniquely identifiable physical acceptance or agreement to a form, document, or other digital source. Digital signatures are an advanced form of esignature that require the signer to authenticate their identity using a digital certificate issued by an independent certificate authority (CA).
eSignature software refers to software and cloud service solutions that:
The software or service may include certain other features or functions, such as workflow automation and analytics, but must, at minimum, meet the aforementioned requirements.
eSignature solutions are an important element in improving both the efficiency and the experience surrounding business-to-business and business-to-consumer content-centric workflows. Frequently, these workflows involve parties outside the organization that are engaged in a business relationship that requires verified contractual consent by either the business, one or more external parties, or both. As an increasing number of documents are “born digital” and organizations continue to digitally transform content-centric workflows, esignature technology has enabled those workflows to remain digital and drives a number of benefits including reduction in transaction time and cost, increased security, and improved employee, supplier, partner, and customer experiences.
The contribution of esignature technology to business continuity became glaringly evident during the COVID-19 pandemic. Gaps were exposed in organizations without end-to-end digitally transformed business processes — including when agreements were previously manually routed, faxed, scanned, or printed for signature and remote workers had to seek alternative methods to move the process forward with a less than secure digital signature.
As businesses head into recovery, forward-looking organizations are taking stock. They are reviewing the investments and changes made in the pandemic era and making sure that these are scalable, built using modern architecture, and able to support a broad range of often complex use cases. They are codifying those changes that will endure and making sure that these can not only ensure business resiliency but also lay a foundation for future growth, innovation, and agility. We don’t expect most organizations that accelerated digitization of signing workflows to revert to pre-pandemic manual processes, though the astute business will evaluate current solutions and seek to expand use cases across the enterprise.
There is growing focus on employee experience and sustained focus on customer experience, both of which improve with the adoption of digitized, automated, and transformed signing workflows. Other trends of note are:
In the resilient enterprise, business-critical signing workflows can operate anytime, anywhere with minimal reliance on print infrastructure and paper, a particular physical location, or specific human resources. Not only does this ensure business continuity and provide optimal employee, customer, and partner experiences but this enables scalability, organizational agility, innovation, and competitive differentiation. eSignature solutions are an essential component of digitally transformed signing workflows.
However, before adopting an esignature solution, organizations should perform an organizational assessment to clearly understand the current state of signing workflows, identify gaps, and develop a plan for moving forward. Other recommendations are:
This section briefly explains IDC’s key observations resulting in a vendor’s position in the IDC MarketScape. While every vendor is evaluated against each of the criteria outlined in the Appendix, the description here provides a summary of each vendor’s strengths and challenges.
Adobe is positioned in the Leaders category in this 2021 IDC MarketScape for esignature software. Adobe is a public company founded in 1982 and headquartered in San Jose, California.
Quick facts about Adobe are as follows:
Consider Adobe if you are looking for a robust, global, enterprise-class signing solution that can be integrated with a broad range of applications and support a large number of use cases. Microsoft users can exploit the tight integration between Adobe Sign and Microsoft 365. Users of other Adobe solutions should look at opportunities to integrate Adobe Sign into existing Adobe workflows.
eSignature software refers to software and cloud service solutions that issue an encrypted, signed document from a sender, transport the document via a secure communications channel, present the document to one or more signers, record the signers’ actions, re-encrypt the document, and return the document to the originator via secured communications.
Though this IDC MarketScape evaluates esignature software as its own market, the reality is that there are few “pure-play” esignature software vendors, particularly when we consider the larger vendors that met the inclusion criteria for this IDC MarketScape (described in this section). eSignature solutions are frequently a component of a broader portfolio of content or identity services. This makes sense because an electronic signature must be part of a digitized signing workflow, and the more that workflow is truly transformed from its paper-based origins, the more those electronic signatures can be leveraged for efficiency, productivity, and security gains.
eSignature software vendors roughly fall into several broad categories, all of which are represented in this IDC MarketScape:
Any vendor participating in this IDC MarketScape had to showcase that it met the following inclusion criteria:
For the purposes of this analysis, IDC divided potential key measures for success into two primary categories: capabilities and strategies.
Positioning on the y-axis reflects the vendor’s current capabilities and menu of services and how well aligned the vendor is to customer needs. The capabilities category focuses on the capabilities of the company and product today, here and now. Under this category, IDC analysts will look at how well a vendor is building/delivering capabilities that enable it to execute its chosen strategy in the market.
Positioning on the x-axis, or strategies axis, indicates how well the vendor’s future strategy aligns with what customers will require in three to five years. The strategies category focuses on high-level decisions and underlying assumptions about offerings, customer segments, and business and go-to-market plans for the next three to five years.
The size of the individual vendor markers in the IDC MarketScape represents the market share of each individual vendor within the specific market segment being assessed.
IDC MarketScape criteria selection, weightings, and vendor scores represent well-researched IDC judgment about the market and specific vendors. IDC analysts tailor the range of standard characteristics by which vendors are measured through structured discussions, surveys, and interviews with market leaders, participants, and end users. Market weightings are based on user interviews, buyer surveys, and the input of IDC experts in each market. IDC analysts base individual vendor scores, and ultimately vendor positions on the IDC MarketScape, on detailed surveys and interviews with the vendors, publicly available information, and end-user experiences in an effort to provide an accurate and consistent assessment of each vendor’s characteristics, behavior, and capability.
eSignature software is a submarket of the document applications functional market. Document applications enable users to create, author, edit, and publish content, including text documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. These documents may include embedded images, audio, and/or video.
eSignature software refers to software and cloud service solutions that issue an encrypted, signed document from a sender, transport the document via a secure communications channel, present the document to one or more signers, record the signers’ actions, re-encrypt the document, and return the document to the originator via secured communications.
In this IDC MarketScape, we consider four types of esignatures:
The legality and admissibility of electronically signed documents vary both by country and with degrees of authentication of the signer. In 1999, the United States National Conference of Commissioners introduced the Uniform Electronic Transactions Act (UETA). The UETA only acquired authority through the enactment of state legislators, so the legitimacy of electronic signatures depended on the individual states. In 2000, the U.S. Congress adopted the Electronic Signatures in Global and National Commerce Act (ESIGN), recognizing the significance of electronic transactions and updating many commerce-related regulations. (Some highly regulated transactions are excluded from this legislation.)
A similar directive was established in the European Union (The Electronic Signatures Directive 1999/93/EC); however, this was replaced in 2014 by eIDAS (Electronic Identification, Authentication and Trust Services) and is augmented by advanced electronic signature (AdES) and qualified electronic signature (QES) for digital signatures using qualified certificates.
Similar laws have been enacted in many other regions. A few examples are: