Jason M. Lemkin – CEO from Echosign wrote:

Most importantly, we will grow from where we are today (about 1% of all contracts signed on the web) to 50%+ (the majority) in 4-6 years. The broader market will grow 50x, and with that, the market will fundamentally change. At a product/technical level, there will be at least 3 important evolutions as the % of contracts signed on the web that we see at EchoSign:

• Seamless web workflow (integrations). Today, it’s still relatively nichey to, for example, create a document in Google Docs or pull a form from DropBox or Box.net, review/edit/collaborate on the document, send it out to get signed, and then have it all stored on the web, in the cloud. In 3-5 years, the entire contracting workflow and process will be 100% web and cloud based.
• 100% web-based contract. Today, only a minority of e-signed contracts are created purely on the web. Instead, most contracts are still local content – a local PDF, or a local Word document. In 3-5 years, the contract will be 100% web-based and completely abstracted from not only paper, but from an off-line contract creation process. This makes e-signatures a requisite, not optional, part of the contracting process.
• Dramatically more functionality. From a functionality perspective, the solutions and market are still at a nascent stage. As the market grows 50x in the next few years, the demands for functionality will grow 50x. Whether it’s basic things like HTML5 support for e-signing on the iPad, or tailoring the electronic signature experience in real-time based on the country the signer is in, or bigger changes, like true web-based contract collaboration, the bar will continue to go up.

Because of this, the market is likely to end up with “2.5″ leading players. E-signatures and e-contracting are too nuanced, and require too much workflow and too high a level of user-specific functionality, to become just a feature of another solution. The level of solution complexity certainly is not as high as standalone CRM, for example (where competing with Salesforce.com at this point is impractical), but it is much higher than simple web apps (e.g., document or content storage) or even web conferencing/collaboration (WebEx/GoToMeeting/etc.). The solutions also benefit from scale and users, but do not have a true network effect. Also, electronic signatures have a significant legal component, which creates challenges to immature products.

Thus, 4-5 years out (perhaps not 3), we are likely to see (x) e-signatures having become the primary way contracts are signed, period, with (y) a few leaders (a la WebEx and GoToMeeting) whose products are deeply integrated with, but not subsumed by, the workflows and integrations of the web, along with a few smaller players with niche offerings and relatively small customer bases.

Gerald Cäsar, CEO of xyzmo SIGNificant wrote:

In my view the e-signature market will split up into at least two different segments:

• Cloud-based electronic signature platforms (“click-to-sign”). Their offering is typically: “Simply drag and drop “Sign Here” and “Initial Here” tabs. Click and send—that’s all.” Handwritten signatures and digital certificates do not play a dominant role in these offerings. For this market I agree with Jason’s view that it will end up with “2.5” leading players. The changing game could be how on-demand CRM systems like Salesforce and others behave in the next 2–3 years. For them these functionalities are a logical additional feature of their existing offering and they already have workflows, document archiving and so on. Maybe they simply acquire existing providers—the investment of Salesforce in Docusign might be an indication for that—or some others might consider launching these features themselves. This could lead to a quite different view about the future of this market segment.
• A second market is enterprise platforms for large corporations. These platforms support multiple methods of e-signing including signature pads, smartphones, digital certificates and “click-to-sign”. They are a highly flexible and scalable enterprise solution. Partly as (private) cloud, partly as dedicated, on-premises solutions. It might be that this area will also end up with “2.5” remaining players, but it is unlikely that this will happen already in 3–4 years, simply because of the influence of local aspects like the legal situation of the country, local sales and support, and not forgetting partnerships with resellers in different regions of the world.

There might be some overlap between both segments, and it is hard to say today which one will be the largest segment at the end of the day. For some customers both offerings might be attractive, but in most cases I do not see that the dominant players in one area have the necessary functionalities and the right business model for the other area.

System integrators who have not only existing relationships but also in-depth knowledge of existing IT-systems and processes will also play an important role in spreading the e-signature solutions around the globe. For them enterprise platform providers are a much more natural fit and business partner than “click-to-sign”-platforms. The larger and broader the customer installation planned, the more important this difference will get.

All of that is of course speculative, and a market that is at its beginning and growing that fast in the next years might change, through M&A and other influences, quite dramatically.