It's tough to think of a more trite concept than "the paperless office". According to Wikipedia, the term may have been coined in 1975 in a Businessweek article entitled "The Office of the Future".
The failure of the paperless office has been due to one obvious factor -- too much work to get the benefits. In 1975 perhaps it was mimeographing and microficheing. Until very recently, it was scanning, PDF'ing, inputting, tagging, storing, archiving. Too much pain when business works OK today.
But we can tell you that 33 years later, something is finally and truly changing now with our 350,000 EchoSigners, and the reason is a term and concept that may also be trite already, but is just as powerful - "the cloud" and the concept of doing all your computing on the internet.
The traction we are seeing with now thousands of customers and salesteams is based on what's changed on the "front end" of the paperless office - the apps we use to create contracts and track customers. Whether it's using Salesforce.com, Zoho, Gmail, or just plain Windows XP and Internet Explorer ... everyone is working "in the cloud" now, whether they think about it or not. And they don't want to leave.
And by far the clunkiest and most painful part of the document and contract process is execution. It's not that fax and FedEx are bad. I's just that you once you've moved to the PC and the web to create; track (e.g., Salesforce); interact (e.g., WebEx) and manage your customers and business on the web and on your PC -- it's too painful to leave.
The paperless office in 1975 was about analog [create] -> analog [sign] -> digital [store]. But today it's digital -> analog -> digital. Switch the middle to digital with EchoSign. And the entire customer and contracting process can be done in clicks, from the web, anywhere, anytime.
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