Adobe Updates Document Cloud To Spur Digital Transformation

Adobe recently introduced Adobe Sign, an e-signature solution, and announced integration between Adobe Sign and Adobe Marketing Cloud.

Formerly known as Adobe Document Cloud eSign services, Adobe Sign is designed to bring trusted e-signatures to any organization easily and securely. The integration between Adobe Sign and Adobe Marketing Cloud eliminates manual, paper-based processes and is aimed at easing the way for digital transformation.

Adobe keeps “hearing about digital transformation and how critical it’s becoming as an issue for our customers,” said Mark Grilli, vice president of product marketing.

Companies are concerned that if they don’t transform they might disappear, he said.

Customer experience

“The biggest area of concern is around customer experience,” Grilli said. “A fully digital experience is better than a paper-based one, or one that has gaps and is part digital and part paper. This is a theme we see in the market and we see from customers.”

Citing an IDC study, Grilli said 40 percent of companies on the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index will not exist in 10 years. The IDC study also found that 77 percent of organizations reported having gaps in their existing systems that affect the customer experience and 72 percent said improving document processes would increase customer satisfaction. However, 80 percent of document processes still rely on paper, Grilli said.

Adobe Sign works with Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) Forms, a core piece in the Adobe Marketing Cloud strategy, to help organizations to go completely digital with anything from credit card applications to government benefit forms or medical forms, Adobe said.

This integration enables organizations to provide an end-to-end digital form filling and signing experience for customers on any channel; speed up time-to-market and achieve efficiency savings for forms management; continually improve the user experience with Adobe Target; and analyze and optimize performance with Adobe Analytics, Josh van Tonder, a solutions manager with Adobe’s Worldwide Government group, said in a blog post.

Adobe also is working on supporting e-signatures is Europe and is rolling out new data centers and meeting the legal requirements in the EU as part of a global expansion that will continue through 2016.

In a blog post, Dan Puterbaugh, director and associate general counsel for Adobe, said EU businesses have needed a single e-signature law applied uniformly across all member states, and in 2014, the Council of the European Union adopted eIDAS to meet that need. eIDAS supplies a legal structure for electronic identification, signatures, seals and documents throughout the EU. eIDAS goes into effect July 1, 2016.

“With eIDAS on the horizon, new opportunities are going to arise for all companies doing business in the EU,” Puterbaugh said. “To help businesses seize those opportunities, Adobe has been building out its infrastructure with technology and information assets to make e-signatures as easy and secure to use in the EU as they are in the U.S.”

Adobe has added support and integration for EU Trust Lists and is the first major vendor to do so, Puterbaugh said.”And we’ve ensured that we have the local expertise in place to serve this new EU single digital market.”

Adobe’s new Document Cloud storage integrations with Box and Microsoft OneDrive are aimed at making it easier to access and work on PDF files from anywhere. Adobe also announced new features for its Acrobat DC subscribers.

“Every company and organization should be laser-focused on delivering the best customer experience possible, and the best experience does not involve paper,” said Bryan Lamkin, executive vice president and general manager for digital media at Adobe, said in a statement.

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