I’ve recently started working with eOriginal, a digital signature and vault solution that has had great success in North America, particularly in consumer lending but also in government, health and transport/logistics.  This sort of product offfers some fantastic benefits for companies that generate significant numbers of agreements or other documents requiring signature.  In addition to reducing the cycle time for execution of documents, the cost savings on printing, couriering, filing and retrieving documents makes for a pretty compelling investment case, particularly since eOriginal is an on-demand SaaS offering.  It’s easily integrated with loan origination and other document production systems.   The electronic vault technology is the only solution accepted in the U.S. for purposes of securitising pools of financial instruments and is covered by an impressive portfolio of patents.  It ensures that the electronic originals are tamperproof as well as providing for transfer of ownership of documents.

Australian legislation, through the Electronic Transactions Act (1999), enables electronic signatures as a mechanism for execution of most kinds of agreements, but we seem to be in the very early stages of adopting this technology.  I’d be interested to hear your thoughts about why the adoption has been so limited?  And of course,  if you are interested in the solution feel free to contact me!

Over the past few weeks I’ve been researching more and more into the SaaS world.  The ScioDec blog has some interesting posts, and this recent one doesn’t have a lot new to say, but sums up what most of the people I speak to are thinking.

http://blog.sciodev.com/2008/12/31/prediction-more-clouds-and-saas-in-2009/

In the meantime, it’s not totally clear to me how the business model is going to work for a lot of the smaller players unless they get swallowed up by salesforce.com or others.

I’m also reading Groundswell, the book about social media written by analysts at Forrester.  It’s a great summary of the impacts that social media is starting to have in the world of marketing and how corporations can harness the power and reach of social media to their advantage.