Docusign Expands Its Developer Community With New Platform
When someone needs a digital signature for a legal document or other business agreement, the first service provider name that’s likely to come up is Docusign. This San Francisco-based company, which owns more than two-thirds (67.6% in 2023) of the global digital signature market, practically invented the sector way back in 2003 — four years before an iPhone rang in anybody’s pocket.
Docusign’s eSignature Software as a Service liberated businesses from slow-moving, paper-based legal agreements. But the company has evolved beyond this innovation. It now offers what it calls an Intelligent Agreement Management platform that covers the entire life cycle of agreements — from creation, verification and negotiation to signing, management and documentation. Intelligent Agreement Management even enables the use of WhatsApp for document delivery in regions such as Latin America, where the app is very popular.
Intelligent Agreement Management, launched last April, includes AI-powered insights and no-code workflows to smooth out business processes and is catching on big time.
New Developer Tools and Resources
Due to its continued fast growth, the company is intentional about expanding its developer ecosystem for added support. Docusign’s success over the last 21 years has been built on developers creating custom integrations using the company’s APIs. With its new platform, there are now many more opportunities for developers to build extensions and plugins, improving customization and integration capabilities.
On Nov. 20, at its inaugural Docusign Discover event, Docusign is driving another stake in the digital ground by introducing Docusign for Developers, a suite of tools and resources designed for developers, partners and entrepreneurs to continue to evolve agreement management. This enables enterprises to integrate, extend and scale their own solutions on the Intelligent Agreement Management platform, creating agreements through no-code workflows and AI-backed insights.
“For the first time ever, a developer can build an extension or an extension of Docusign functionality,” Larry Jin, Docusign’s VP of product management, told The New Stack. “Previously, developers could only create an application to send a document to someone. Now, what a developer can do is actually build a plugin for a Docusign document that can be used in our workflow system to be able to read or write data from an external system, write a file to an external system, or even perform things like credit checks and verifications.”
This new platform elevates the science of creating digital business agreements to a whole new level. “This is an entirely new opportunity for developers to build new use cases for customers in a meaningful way,” Jin said.
However, these documents all have basic elements that cannot be taken for granted.
“A lot goes into creating an agreement,” Jin said. “It’s finding the right document template; it’s inserting the right language. It’s then potentially negotiating on that agreement and making revisions and edits that might not happen if you’re buying something from a company. But when two companies are dealing with each other, as is often the case in the enterprise space, those contracts are typically heavily negotiated and edited and revised. We provide tools and capabilities for our customers to do those things.
“For businesses to run effectively — or to run at all — stakeholders have to shake hands on agreements. Agreements between owners and managers with employees, service providers and landlords; between owners and their partners; between salespeople and customers, and so on.”
Developers Are Integral to Business Agreements
During the last 12 months alone, Docusign users have committed more than 1.2 billion signatures, with in excess of 500 million of those powered by API integrations built by developers. This scale underscores the hugely important role developers play in shaping the way business agreements are designed and executed.
Thus, developers need all the useful tools they can find. Key components of Docusign for Developers include:
- Developer Console: A central place to create, test, publish and manage extension apps that work with Docusign Intelligent Agreement Management solutions.
- Extension Apps: These allow developers to integrate their unique functionalities or services into Docusign and distribute them through the Docusign App Center to reach the company’s 1.6 million customers.
- Agreement APIs: An expansion of Docusign’s existing API portfolio (eSignature, Web Forms, Admin) with new Agreement APIs that embed Intelligent Agreement Management platform capabilities into external product experiences, enabling developers to build integrations that extend beyond eSignature. These new APIs include Maestro API (in beta), which empowers developers to programmatically integrate workflows with their systems, enabling advanced automation and customization of agreement processes; and Navigator API (also in beta), which facilitates the querying and integration of structured agreement data, as well as AI-driven insights into external applications.
- Docusign Developer Center: This provides new developer tools, including software development kits (SDKs) and plugins, content, sample apps and quickstart guides.
Interacting With Business Intelligence Tools and AI
“If I’m a big company, I might be using a best-in-class business intelligence tool like Tableau or (Microsoft) Power BI. I might be running my data analytics and something like Snowflake or Databricks. And to be able to take the data from Docusign and be able to power these other business applications, I think, is going to be really critical for our enterprise audience,” Jin said.
Docusign Intelligent Agreement Management uses AI to extract and analyze key information from contracts, enabling businesses to proactively identify risks, obligations and potential issues. “We provide AI capabilities to help our customers understand the content of the agreements, what’s in them, helping them understand risks and to navigate that risk,” Jin said.
AI in Docusign Intelligent Agreement Management identifies a potential risk: auto-renewal language that could lock the signer into a lengthy contract. (Source: Docusign)
Risk mitigation is an important component of what Docusign calls the “agreement trap problem,” Jin said.
“This is something we actually worked with Deloitte to create a study around, because the amount of economic loss from businesses because they don’t properly manage their contracts and their agreements is huge,” Jin said. “They don’t know what’s in them. They don’t know the risks. Some event could happen in the world, or a change in regulation takes place, and some shipping-container cargo ship gets stuck in the Suez Canal — and all of a sudden you have all of these contractual obligations that you can’t meet. There’s actually a ton of economic value that gets lost due to that.”
Other Aspects of Digital Agreements
There are aspects of digital agreements that might not be apparent at first that come to the fore over time.
“There’s the actual point of signing, which, again, is actually a lot more complex and involved than one might think because, in different jurisdictions, you may require additional proof,” Jin said. “You may need to prove you are who you are as part of signing, and not just putting the signature on. You may need to bring in an online notary, for instance. So there’s a lot that goes into the actual point of signing it, which we call the commitment part of agreements.
“And then there’s all this really interesting space that we’re starting to see emerge, which is: What do you do with all the agreements that have been signed? How do you manage them?”
Jin cited the importance of data privacy and compliance with regulations such as the General Data Protection Resolution (GDPR), noting that Docusign has data centers in various regions to ensure local data residency. “Our brand is really synonymous with trust, and we take data privacy, data residency and all kinds of local regulations really seriously,” Jin said.
Docusign’s Longtime Relationship With Developers
Docusign credits a lot of its growth to its existing developer community.
“Maybe people don’t sort of realize that, because so much of the interaction with Docusign is just through signing, but most of the documents that you get to sign come from some kind of an integration that a developer built,” Jin said. “And oftentimes those developers built those integrations using our APIs for some internal, bespoke need, or some custom needs. Think about T-Mobile, for example, when you were buying the new iPhone or signing something using Docusign that was a custom integration they built.
“So I think we pride ourselves in actually having a really strong existing developer audience.”
Docusign competes in a crowded market that includes Adobe, Zoho, Pandadoc, GeoTrust, Secured Signature, Entrust, Broadcom and numerous others. More than 15,100 companies utilize DocuSign’s services (as of 2023), making it the leading provider in the e-signature sector. The overall digital signature market is experiencing rapid growth and is projected to expand from $5.25 billion in 2023 to $118.88 billion by 2032, according to Fortune Business Insights.
Docusign is based in San Francisco with additional offices in London, Sydney, Sao Paulo and Dublin.
