Keith Krach Shares New DocuSign Developments at IBM World of Watson

12.14.2016 4 min read
Keith Krach Shares New DocuSign Developments at IBM World of Watson

Keith Krach, DocuSign Chairman and CEO, was recently interviewed on theCUBE* at IBM World of Watson in Las Vegas. He was joined by Inhi Cho Suh, GM of Collaboration Solutions at IBM. Together, the two tech influencers sat down with John Furrier and Dave Valante from SILICONAngle Media, to share their thoughts on the DocuSign and IBM partnership.

Partnership with IBM

While DocuSign provides unprecedented efficiency as a standalone service, its power is compounded when integrated with other industry-leading solutions. Suh explained how IBM’s partnership with DocuSign would provide users with the ability to dramatically simplify workflows: “Let’s say you have a client. You’re working on a sales opportunity within Salesforce. Within the workspace application you can actually surface that Salesforce opportunity for that end client and have the team work on it. You can check your transactional systems or BI systems, then come back, send the sales proposal for signature with DocuSign and you’re on your way.

Krach also spoke about the DocuSign Global Trust Network’s continued momentum, being fueled, in part, by additional value-added capabilities in partnership with IBM. Built around Watson work, the capabilities come from a family of IBM and partner applications that actually understand the user personally and contextually. Missed a work conversation? Watson Workspace knows what you need, and will provide snapshots of the missed conversation.

“Let’s say you’re in a conversation stream with a team of 20 people and you get interrupted throughout the day or you’ve gone away for business travel and you come back,

said Suh.

“How do you get a 30 second snapshot of all the conversations that happened? We’ve included Watson APIs within it to curate a quick way to say, ‘I have 10 seconds can you give me the 10-second summary?’ Or, ‘I have 30 minutes can you give me the 30-minute summary?’ to focus your time and attention.

One of the primary goals of the DocuSign Global Trust Network is to bring additional value-added capabilities to DocuSign’s more than 250,000 companies and 100 million users across 188 countries. “This is where Watson comes in, explained Krach. He went on to describe how Watson could help the user make smarter decisions, smarter approvals, and smarter agreements. “That’s a huge value add on to the global trust network, he said.

DocuSign API, Blockchain and Payments

A significant portion of DocuSign’s users seek out the technology for the depth and breadth of its integrations with partners like IBM. However, the predominant way in which people use DocuSign is through its APIs. The company has been committed to designing the APIs in an open way to allow developers more flexibility in their writing. “About 58% of our sends are through our APIs, said Krach. “That part of our business is growing at more than 300% on an annual basis. That is turbo-charging the DocuSign Global Trust Network. Now we’re adding about 130,000 unique users per day.

Krach also touched upon the capabilities of Blockchain, citing a recent demo highlighting DocuSign’s partnership with Visa’s secure payment technology: Users can lease a car from a car.

“So you’re leasing a car, right?,

said Krach.

“Boom — DocuSign, it kicks off a parametric workflow. You need insurance? Boom kicks that off. Okay I need to pay for it. I’m going to choose which method of payment and utilize DocuSign Payments. In partnership with Stripe, DocuSign Payments users can pay Apple Pay, Android Pay and others. It’s a digital handshake. You’re authenticated.

The recent release of DocuSign Payments further adds to the trend of personalized, intuitive workflows. DocuSign Payments provides users with the ability to sign and pay for virtually anything in a single step. Renting an apartment? You can sign the lease and provide the first month’s rent and security deposit as part of the same transaction.

The ultimate goals of DocuSign’s partnership with IBM, Stripe, Visa, along with the development of DocuSign Payments are, of course, the same: To remove friction from agreements to create a simpler, more intuitive workflow and transaction. To learn more about how DocuSign and IBM are working together to create more innovative user experiences watch the full video here.