There's a traditional $100m segment of enterprise software known as CLM, or Contract LifeCycle Management, which for most of the past 10-15 years has been pretty staid (and grown pretty slowly). CLM has focused on on-premise software for managing complex contracts, generally buy-side contracts (e.g., procurement), and with a strong focus on selling to legal as a vertical (the folks with all the liability when complex contracts go wrong, or are lost).
Like much of enterprise software, CLM has traditionally been expensive, with long-sale cycles and complex implementation cycles, often measured in years. A few vendors, like our partners Apptus and Upside, have shaken up the market and changed a number of these assumptions around by moving to a SaaS / on-demand model.
CLM though has traditionally only focused on two pieces of contracting -- archiving and then managing complex, high dollar contracts, and more recently, authoring and creating contracts. We've always believed since founding that electronic signatures are the key "glue" to make CLM truly end-to-end digital.
We were thus gratified and pleased to see AMR Research's most recent report on CLM which positioned Contract Signature as a key evolution of a truly digital CLM Business Process (with ourselves highlighted in the report) -- along with cloud-based Authoring systems like Google Docs (which EchoSign has integrated natively).
CLM software can be overkill for high volume, routing contracts like a standard, formulaic sales agreement. In those cases, often (x) a simpler-to-deploy combination of a tool to create form contracts (Google Docs or Box.net, or the EchoSign form library, or a Conga Merge in the Salesforce ecosystem) combined (y) with a service like EchoSign for signing, tracking, storing, and managing, can completely automate the contracting processes.
However, for more complex, lower volume, higher-dollar contracts with many participants, reviewers, and stakeholders, with complex post-contracting compliance, CLM software can provide huge value. And there, connecting CLM software with automated contract execution closes the loop.
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