With 'Sign', Adobe Wants to Bring Paperless Customer Experiences to India

Adobe on Thursday unveiled the first integration between Adobe Sign and Adobe Marketing Cloud, with the aim of helping organisations go completely digital with process like credit card applications to inter-company forms, and more. Adobe also announced new Document Cloud integrations in the form of Box and Microsoft OneDrive. The company has also rolled out new data centres in the EU, with more coming up in Asia Pacific and Japan later this year.

"Businesses in India are looking at minimising or eliminating the use of paper by streamlining frustrating paper-based processes to more agile digital workflows," said Umang Bedi, Adobe's managing director for South Asia. "Powered by new integrations with Box, Microsoft OneDrive and the Adobe Marketing Cloud and innovations like Adobe Sign, Document Cloud holds significant potential for India in the years to come." Document Cloud includes PDF solution Acrobat DC; Adobe Sign, which allows anyone to electronically sign and send documents from any device; and a suite of a companion mobile applications.

"Essentially, we are bringing in a suite of desktop and mobile applications along with APIs to integrate into any third-party system with the enterprise or on a cloud allowing you to sign those documents [and] create a workflow so you can really satisfy the last mile [in a paperless manner]," Bedi told Gadgets 360 in a telephonic interview on Wednesday.

He said that Adobe products were processing 150 million signatures every day, and in 2015 Adobe Document Cloud processed over 6 billion electronic and digital signatures. Customers in India include Mindtree, IGATE, Tata Communications, and Hero Cycles.

"With digitalisation of workflows a key focus area and the fast emergence of smart cities, the Government of India has accelerated its digital transformation agenda and is looking at driving nation-wide impact through use of technology," Bedi pointed out. "Adobe Document Cloud offers a robust and compelling proposition for government organisations looking to transform their end-user experience through digitisation."

Bedi highlighted organisations that have gone completely digital using Adobe Document Cloud with certain aspects of their processes. For example, in an organisation where the employee on-boarding process is completely digital, you will receive a digital offer letter from the company that you can digitally sign. Immediately, you will be emailed a copy of the document for your records, while one is stored in the company's records. At any stage, you can integrate third-party systems like Oracle, Salesforce, Workday, SAP via API hooks to trigger custom actions in other systems.

For example, once the offer letter has been signed, an entry can automatically be created for the employee in the HRMS system and emails sent to various other departments like IT, Finance to enable smooth on-boarding of the employee. Other organisations have completely eliminated paper from their contract process, enabling digital drafting, revisions, and even signing of all contracts within the company.

The new Acrobat and Adobe Sign capabilities are expected to be available to customers later this month. The ability to add a Box account to Acrobat DC and Acrobat Reader on desktop is expected by the end of this month. The ability for Acrobat Reader mobile users on iPhone and iPad to select Box as their preferred cloud service from the iOS document picker is expected by the end of next month. Initial access to Acrobat DC and Adobe Sign from the Box website is expected by the end of this month, with deeper integration expected by Fall 2016, Adobe said.

The ability to add a OneDrive account to Acrobat DC and Acrobat Reader on desktop, and the ability for Acrobat Reader mobile users on iPhone and iPad to select OneDrive as their preferred cloud storage provider from the iOS universal document picker, is expected by the end of June.

Written with inputs from IANS