How Apryse Helped Egnyte Provide 17,000 Businesses With an E-signature Solution

“Apryse offered Egnyte a complete E-signature solution that could be seamlessly incorporated into our existing application servers, providing flexibility for deployment, monitoring, and scalability across our global data centers.” - Greg Neustaetter, VP of Products

Founded in 2008 in Mountain View, California, Egnyte originally started as a file server in the cloud for businesses. While initially focused on providing a robust file storage solution, they quickly recognized the growing importance of security, governance, and compliance. As a result, they developed advanced features to enhance data security within their platform and other repositories. This emphasis on security and compliance has made Egnyte the preferred choice for security-conscious businesses with a heavy focus on Life Sciences and AEC organizations.

Having expanded its capabilities beyond simple file storage in recent years, Egnyte has incorporated additional workflow functionalities into its platform, enabling customers to perform complex business processes, including document review and approvals.

With a growing need to bring e-signing capabilities to their customers who upload millions of PDF documents to the platform daily, they looked to Apryse to build a full-fledged E-signature solution where they could add signers, mark up a document with assigned fields, have users sign, resulting in a digitally signed PDF with all the user signatures/fields.

Egnyte

Egnyte provides a productive and collaborative file storage solution for businesses, with third-party app support and a desktop client for local storage. They provide content security, compliance, and collaboration capabilities to govern content. Egnyte's software can be used to scan a range of data repositories for malware — including email, on-premises storage, and third-party cloud storage. 

Apryse

Apryse provides unrivaled document processing technology for developers. Our SDKs, pre-built components, and end-user SaaS applications enable the companies to generate, convert, view, edit, and sign documents within their applications and workflows.

Egnyte Web 

Egnyte’s PDF capabilities in the Egnyte Web UI now allow users to have a much richer experience with thumbnails, search, annotations panel, higher fidelity view, and better zooming. PDF files are the most commonly uploaded and shared documents with Egnyte, and these improvements bring Egnyte’s PDF capabilities to the next level, which include annotations and, most importantly, E-signatures.

Having researched the capabilities of various E-signature vendors and given Egnyte’s experience and partnerships in this field, they understood the importance of working with a vendor that could handle large AEC customers, for example, who frequently view substantially large 500MB PDF drawings on iPads.

After evaluating our demo, Egnyte found that Apryse would be a good fit, but they wanted to explore the possibility of developing their own solution with a set timeframe of six to nine months. With cost being a significant consideration for Egnyte, they looked to see how many developers would be needed and how long it would take to release an initial product version.

Based on an internal analysis of when they could build out a full-fledged server-side and client-side E-signature solution and the lengthy timeframe, they decided to look for an established leader in the field to speed up the time to market.

Egnyte was interested in the tools Apryse offered to help build a front and back-end E-signature solution. After going through the process, they realized that some of the modules could be used both to improve the overall PDF preview experience and to add PDF annotation capabilities, an important feature for their AEC customers.

When evaluating their options, rather than solely focusing on comparison for their E-signature initiative, they saw an opportunity to address other areas of their product by utilizing a full SDK and licensing individual components.

After conducting proof of concept with other vendors, Egynte stated that Apryse was the right choice. Their evaluation process involved setting up a similar proof of concept with each vendor, and the outcome, specifically in terms of server-side capabilities, tipped the scales in favor of Apryse. While initially other vendors offered similar top-level capabilities based on feature lists, the detailed evaluation and user experience revealed how well Apryse’s solution aligned with their requirements.

Greg Neustaetter, VP of Products, stated that “Apryse offered Egnyte a complete E-signature solution, amongst other capabilities, that could be seamlessly incorporated into our existing application servers, providing flexibility for deployment, monitoring, and scalability across our global data centers.”

The implementation process has been a very positive experience. High-level guides, samples, and support provided by Apryse pointed Egnyte's developers in the right direction and helped them with the process.

Greg stated, "The documentation was great, and Egnyte didn't encounter any major gaps or issues with it." Since deployment, feedback from Egnyte customers has been great with a substantial increase in user engagement.

Greg explained that in the past, Egnyte customers expressed their struggles with large PDFs and found it challenging to locate information in them. For example, an AEC customer faced challenges with large documents stored in Egnyte, specifically PDFs with 100+ pages. Users needed to find information within these documents, but their viewer lacked essential features such as search functionality and thumbnails. As a result, users would often resort to downloading the PDFs and use external tools like Acrobat to search and navigate through the content. This approach posed security risks and the potential for outdated document versions.

With Apryse’s solution, users now have their needs addressed. They have praised the search, thumbnails, and outline view features, which have enabled users to perform these actions within the web environment seamlessly.

While the primary reason for Egnyte's interest was in our E-signature solution, they have delved into other features Apryse has to offer and have realized that our technology could address even more use cases they had in mind.

Since partnering with Apryse, they have decided to leverage the licensed functionalities for E-signatures to enhance their web application's PDF viewer. They also added support for customers to edit PDFs by incorporating features like annotations, form fields, and form filling. This is just the beginning of Egnyte's relationship with Apryse, and we are excited to see what the future holds as their needs evolve.