DocuSign unveils System of Agreement vision at Momentum 2018

Company announces the future of its agreements platform with product updates for blockchain, artificial intelligence, and responsive signing

SAN FRANCISCO, June 20, 2018 -- Following its successful initial public offering in April of this year, DocuSign today kicked off its annual customer, partner and developer conference—Momentum 2018—by unveiling its expanded vision, along with new product innovations designed to deliver on it.

The company's vision is centered around modernizing the world's Systems of Agreement: the technologies and processes that companies use to prepare, sign, enact and manage agreements. This builds on DocuSign's existing standing as the world's #1 e-signature solution provider. And it broadens the company's platform to automate and connect what happens before, during and after an e-signature is executed.

"We're on a mission to make the world more agree-able by transforming the foundational element of business: the agreement process," said Dan Springer, CEO of DocuSign. "With e-signature, we took the paper out of paperwork—something that has garnered us more than 400,000 paying customers and hundreds of millions of users worldwide today. We now see an expanded opportunity to do the same for the entire agreement process."

Geoffrey Moore, author of Crossing the Chasm and co-author of the white paper, The Rise of Modern Systems of Agreement, agrees—adding: "Over the years, companies have invested billions of dollars to digitally transform their Systems of Record and to create automated Systems of Engagement. But neither of those established platforms handles the complexities and legalities of agreement processes natively or easily. I believe that System of Agreement platforms will fill this gap. It's a new and long-overdue category."

To bring this vision to life, DocuSign showcased more than a dozen product innovations at Momentum 2018—many of which are slated to ship with the DocuSign Summer '18 Release or at other milestone times later this year. Some highlights of that innovation include:

• Blockchain: DocuSign demonstrated a live integration with the Ethereum blockchain, allowing evidence of a DocuSigned agreement to be automatically written to Ethereum. DocuSign also announced two policy and standards-based activities: membership in the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance, where DocuSign is collaborating with industry leaders to define blockchain best practices and open standards; and membership in the Chamber of Digital Commerce, where DocuSign will work with policy makers and regulatory agencies on blockchain initiatives.
• DocuSign for Salesforce CPQ: Agreement processes such as pricing quotes and proposals often involve multiple paper documents, multiple parties, and the time-consuming issues of signing, scanning, and emailing. DocuSign for Salesforce CPQ (Configure, Price, Quote) connects CPQ data into DocuSign agreements, which can be sent directly from Salesforce. The result is a faster and easier experience at every stage of the quote-to-cash process.
• Responsive Signing: Using a customer example that is already live in hundreds of retail stores across the United States, DocuSign demonstrated a new technology that renders an agreement 'responsively'—meaning it is easily readable whether the user is on a desktop, tablet or phone. The technology automatically converts a PDF agreement into responsive HTML on the fly, which means no more squinting at shrunken PDFs on small screens.
• Smart Sections: DocuSign also showcased how customers can take Responsive Signing to the next level by defining collapsible sections, page breaks, custom formatting options, and more. Especially important for longer or more complex agreements, this additional structure and interactivity delivers a further-enhanced experience over static PDFs.
• Artificial Intelligence for Search and Insights: DocuSign also demonstrated AI-based search and agreement analytics. Available as part of the Intelligent Insights platform extension by Seal Software, this technology uses machine learning and natural language processing to go beyond keywords and seek to understand agreement clauses in the way a human being would—for example, knowing that a clause about Internet cookies is about privacy, even when the word privacy is absent.

DocuSign is also continuing to invest in one of its most important audiences: developers. The company recently relaunched an entirely new developer center, designed to provide a best-in-class experience with code examples, SDKs and toolkits. According to Marie Huwe, VP developer programs and evangelism at DocuSign, it has never been easier to get started as a developer.

"We've automated the process for getting developers their integrator keys, so they can be developing against our API almost instantly," said Huwe. "And with almost 60% of all transactions on the DocuSign platform coming through the API today—and more than 80,000 developer sandboxes currently open on the platform—the developer community is extremely important to us."

For more information, visit momentum.docusign.com and developers.docusign.com.