An Illustration of where the total costs of big cloud based solutions can be contained and lowered by dis aggregation of add on integrated features. Especially as the SaaS cloud cost bliss wanes for controllers as cost is no longer justified by comparisons to manual or enterprise systems anymore.

1. WHAT’S AN ELECTRONIC
SIGNATURE WORTH?Apparently for providers of electronic signature solutions
they feel a lot more than what they are charging
customers
An Illustration of where the total costs of big cloud based
solutions can be contained by disaggregation of add on
integrated features
CFO Digital Forum San Francisco CA Bill Kohnen

2. Summary
 Certainly big business should have a better way than
manually managing contracts across their lifecycle
 Electronic documents and signatures are not a
problem in almost all cases
 Enterprise contract management solutions were
expense and people did not use them
 People did start to use internal shared drives, share
point and e-mail
 Cloud Aps like SalesForce catch on and users find
way to integrate in contracts and signature
 Other related solutions (Finance, Accounting,
Purchasing, Legal) stuck in enterprise process
mindset and their User Interfaces were not good
CFO Digital Forum San Francisco CA Bill Kohnen

3. Now
 Initially there was such cloud bliss with savings
and performance relative to enterprise people
did not pay attention to cost of integrations
 The companies that were integrated in such as
Conga/Adobe underestimated this space
 Now they want to recover costs they have
poorly managed for delivering aps to scale and
also want to cash in after the fact. In some
cases trying to capture 2 x cost increases with
multi year contracts
CFO Digital Forum San Francisco CA Bill Kohnen

4. Point of View of Main SaaS
Provider
 Whether it is Sales Force or some other
solution they are agnostic for the most part
about the integrations done with there tools.
 In fact as the absolute cost of SaaS solutions
grows with more users and people stop
comparison to enterprise solutions the big
providers are worried about any integration
that takes up to large of a % of the pie in this
space
CFO Digital Forum San Francisco CA Bill Kohnen

5. Fortunately there are options
 You can pretty easily disaggregate aps and can
revert back to previous methods
 You can keep the process in the main application
such as Salesforce but remove the costly vanity
items and good with freeware or alternate
process.
 Another alternative is that SaaS Purchasing
solutions evolved and most include very functional
contract management modules that are practically
a give away with the entire suites offered.
CFO Digital Forum San Francisco CA Bill Kohnen

6. Action
 This is an example of where Finance and
Purchasing can look to reduce and contain
SaaS costs.
 A challenge is that many corporate IT
departments do not want to touch SaaS
applications, bitterly leaving management of
the application to the users.
 Especially after a couple of years it can make
it hard to find a “technical” champion and user
project manager.
CFO Digital Forum San Francisco CA Bill Kohnen

7. Action
 It is worth doing this though as cost of integrations
is poised to grow up to 2X
 In some cases the integrated Aps drive cloud
based storage small which is expensive with the
providers and you can also end up paying for
more licenses just for people to use the integrated
items and not the main solution purpose (Sales)
 This generally only requires some tactical
technical skill and business process remapping.
There should be no Engineering needed.
CFO Digital Forum San Francisco CA Bill Kohnen