Box signs on to e-signature push for cloud services

Box Inc. Chief Executive Aaron Levie.

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Box Inc. has signed off on a new market that it believes will widely expand its cloud-services business.

Box Sign, a new, native e-signature capability first introduced in February, was released Monday offering unlimited signatures at no extra cost, distinguishing it from competing enterprise products from DocuSign Inc. DOCU, -0.42% and Adobe Inc. ADBE, -0.58% in the $3.8 billion e-signature market.

The company’s biggest product announcement in years is an emphatic nod to companies large and small as they make the lurching transition from paper-based and manual workflows to the cloud.

“Everything will be hybrid in the future” as companies adopt a work anywhere/digital first/security template, Box BOX, -1.08% Chief Executive Aaron Levie told MarketWatch. “We are aggressively building out our cloud services so that the entire content lifecycle is in a single integrated platform.”

Despite the digital transformation plans of so many major businesses, fewer than one in three use e-signatures because of cost barriers and limitations of legacy tools, according to market researcher IDC.

“The reality is that e-signature is a capability, not a product,” IDC analyst Holly Muscolino told MarketWatch. “Box is positioning [e-signature] as one of the services in its content cloud.”

Reflecting its new product’s importance, Box in June hired Diego Dugatkin as chief product officer. Dugatkin previously managed Adobe Sign.

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