Adobe tries to fix its SaaS business with EchoSign acquisition

Over the past year, FedEx earned about half a billion dollars on transfering paper documents. It proves that the electronic signature market will continue to grow rapidly. Adobe (aka the giant of the electronic documents space) also understands this. Last week Adobe acquired the most successful electronic signature service - EchoSign. Adobe intends to close its own service eSignatures (which was still in beta) and integrate EchoSign into its SaaS suite Acrobat.com. However, if you look at what Acrobat.com has recently become, this news is likely to be less of a cause for celebration than commiseration with EchoSign’s users and fans.

Acrobat.com always amazed us with its (not good) value/effectiveness ratio. But its latest update makes us doubting about the adequacy of Adobe's SaaS-policy. Acrobat.com was originally based on the online document editor Buzzword (that Adobe acquired), the file storage and tools for document collaboration. And the service slowly but surely was developing in the collaborative direction. But now the file storage with workspaces and document editors have disappeared. And instead of them - there are five separate services:

- for creating PDF documents

- for converting PDF -> Word

- for creating web-forms

- for sending large files

- for online meetings

Even more amazing is that on the main Adobe site there is still an old description of Acrobat.com. Obviously, such a large corporation simply does not care about small SaaS services.

See also: Top 10 Electronic Signature software