Dana Hernandez, Author at Gigaom

GigaOm Radar for Value Stream Management (VSM)

Dana Hernandez — Mon, 13 May 2024 21:35:36 +0000

Value stream management (VSM) is the go-to method for software development process improvement, which is a requirement for organizations looking to deliver on their digital transformation goals. VSM ensures the value of technology delivery as defined by benefits minus costs. VSM tools and practices remove bottlenecks in the pipeline, improve efficiency, and enable organizations to better understand and manage costs. However, delivering software faster and cheaper means nothing if the resulting outputs are not of value to the business.

We recognize that the latter—business value—needs to be predicated on the former—process efficiency. Engineering management has a clear and present concern with staying abreast of what development teams are working on. At the same time, business leaders are looking to address what they see as the black box of technology delivery and seeking to measure and monitor the bang they are getting for their buck.

At their core, VSM tools combine data integration and dashboards, pull together information from continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) and other development tooling, and enable users to see what is going on. Building on this foundation, vendors offer capabilities to better visualize and interpret the data, provide best practice insights and guidance, enable automation, and so on. For organizations looking to build a coherent picture of their software development pipeline and move away from unwieldy spreadsheets and customized business intelligence (BI) tools, there’s a lot to like about VSM.

The right VSM tooling will depend on an organization’s IT maturity, size of its business, and strategic direction. Some companies may be looking to improve visibility to help managers make better decisions, while others may want to consolidate practices and standards across lines of business. Some organizations may be better suited to a general purpose tool, while others may need one designed for their specific vertical or use case.

This is our fourth year evaluating the VSM solution space in the context of our Key Criteria and Radar reports. This report builds on our previous analysis and considers how the market has evolved over the last year.

This GigaOm Radar report examines 14 of the top VSM solutions and compares offerings against the capabilities (table stakes, key features, and emerging features) and nonfunctional requirements (business criteria) outlined in the companion Key Criteria report. Together, these reports provide an overview of the market, identify leading VSM offerings, and help decision-makers evaluate these solutions so they can make a more informed investment decision.

GIGAOM KEY CRITERIA AND RADAR REPORTS

The GigaOm Key Criteria report provides a detailed decision framework for IT and executive leadership assessing enterprise technologies. Each report defines relevant functional and nonfunctional aspects of solutions in a sector. The Key Criteria report informs the GigaOm Radar report, which provides a forward-looking assessment of vendor solutions in the sector.

The post GigaOm Radar for Value Stream Management (VSM) appeared first on Gigaom.

GigaOm Key Criteria for Evaluating Value Stream Management (VSM) Solutions

Dana Hernandez — Fri, 26 Apr 2024 17:49:16 +0000

Over recent years, the cadence of software delivery has increased from months or years to a matter of weeks. While this means greater agility and innovation, it comes at a cost: application complexity and process fragmentation can cause inefficiency, development pipelines may hit bottlenecks, and resulting applications may not be optimized for user needs. In today’s more cost-conscious climate, organizations cannot afford to fund their technical departments without a clear indication of a return.

Value stream management (VSM) offers insights across the development process and its outputs. In business terms, VSM frameworks and tools bring process improvements to software delivery. Software development processes are characterized as value streams, building on existing lean engineering terminology and emphasizing value delivery.

Since we started this report series four years ago, the VSM space has continued to evolve. Engineering management dashboards have been expanded to deliver business-facing information; meanwhile, vendors have matured to measure the software development lifecycle in more depth.

In this report, we consider the needs of both engineering management and business leadership, focusing on optimizing software development outcomes while minimizing the overheads of its production.

We evaluate VSM features and how well vendors enable best practices—the cultural and process changes necessary across engineering teams and beyond. We review the ways solutions measure efficiency targets (test coverage and pipeline cost), as well as internal metrics such as developer well-being, and measurable business outcomes such as improved service levels, customer experience (CX) and adoption, and increased revenues.

We recognize that VSM is a moving, maturing, and broadening target. We see VSM on a journey toward better software development and operations practices within a cloud-based architecture. Connections with other “XOps” areas (GitOps, NetDevOps, SecOps, FinOps) represent other sides of the same mountain; at the same time, categories such as software development/delivery analytics (SDA) address specific needs. Practices across these areas will inevitably converge and align over time.

Business Imperative
VSM enables businesses to oversee the end-to-end software lifecycle and measure its success or bottlenecks. It allows organizations to improve the way teams deliver high-quality CXs. The ultimate goal is to reduce unnecessary waste by eliminating or minimizing steps that do not add value to the customer or business. By doing this, it is possible to boost efficiency and productivity, reduce waste, and focus on optimizing value in every process for the company’s benefit. This helps leadership focus on improvements and make well-informed decisions based on well-understood metrics and strategic key performance indicators.

Sector Adoption Score
To help executives and decision-makers assess the potential impact and value of a VSM solution deployment to the business, this GigaOm Key Criteria report provides a structured assessment of the sector across five factors: benefit, maturity, urgency, impact, and effort. By scoring each factor based on how strongly it compels or deters adoption of a VSM solution, we provide an overall Sector Adoption Score (Figure 1) of 4.6 out of 5, with 5 indicating the strongest possible recommendation to adopt. This indicates that a VSM solution is a very credible candidate for deployment and worthy of thoughtful consideration.

The factors contributing to the Sector Adoption Score for VSM are explained in more detail in the Sector Brief section that follows.

Key Criteria for Evaluating VSM Solutions

Sector Adoption Score

Deters
Adoption

Discourages
Adoption

Merits
Consideration

Encourages
Adoption

Compels
Adoption

Figure 1. Sector Adoption Score for VSM

This is the fourth year that GigaOm has reported on the VSM space in the context of our Key Criteria and Radar reports. This report builds on our previous analysis and considers how the market has evolved over the last year.

This GigaOm Key Criteria report highlights the capabilities (table stakes, key features, and emerging features) and nonfunctional requirements (business criteria) for selecting an effective VSM solution. The companion GigaOm Radar report identifies vendors and products that excel in those decision criteria. Together, these reports provide an overview of the market, identify leading VSM offerings, and help decision-makers evaluate these solutions so they can make a more informed investment decision.

GIGAOM KEY CRITERIA AND RADAR REPORTS

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GigaOm Radar for Cloud FinOps

Dana Hernandez — Fri, 19 Apr 2024 15:00:04 +0000

In modern IT environments, hybrid and multicloud infrastructures are now the norm, but runaway costs due to unmonitored growth and unanticipated spending have emerged as a major challenge. Enterprise finance departments are currently unable to do accurate cost breakdowns of cloud spends to the correct cost centers, and there’s no transparency in monthly billing or accurate forecasts of future spend. As a result, many organizations pay for services, resources, and licenses that they don’t use or need.

Thankfully, Cloud FinOps has emerged to help businesses realize the value of their cloud investment by fostering both financial accountability and data-driven decision-making.

Cloud FinOps encompasses cloud financial management, an approach centered on bringing finance, business, engineering, and IT teams into closer alignment on cloud spend—the term FinOps in this case is viewed as a blend of finance and DevOps rather than traditional financial operations. FinOps enables finance, development, and operations teams to work together to achieve faster product delivery while predicting and managing cloud costs. The goal is to ensure that cloud spending aligns with business objectives and strategic initiatives, and the focus is on efficiency, optimization, and continuous improvement.

Cloud FinOps differs from the traditional IT procurement CapEx model. Instead of finance allocating budgets to product teams, a cross-functional FinOps team (or cloud center of excellence) coordinates technology, business, and finance to optimize cloud vendor management, service rates, and discounting. This helps organizations better understand the tradeoffs among cost, speed, and quality, which ultimately allows them to gain financial control, drive predictability, and enable faster product delivery while reducing issues of transparency and accountability.

Cloud FinOps encompasses more than just processes and procedures; it also embodies culture, mindset, and best practices adopted at all levels of the organization. It’s all about establishing financial accountability and ensuring value in cloud spending.

This is our third year evaluating the cloud FinOps space in the context of our Key Criteria and Radar reports. This report builds on our previous analysis and considers how the market has evolved over the last year.

This GigaOm Radar report examines 16 of the top cloud FinOps solutions and compares offerings against the capabilities (table stakes, key features, and emerging features) and nonfunctional requirements (business criteria) outlined in the companion Key Criteria report. Together, these reports provide an overview of the market, identify leading cloud FinOps offerings, and help decision-makers evaluate these solutions so they can make a more informed investment decision.

GIGAOM KEY CRITERIA AND RADAR REPORTS

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GigaOm Key Criteria for Evaluating Cloud FinOps Solutions

Dana Hernandez — Fri, 05 Apr 2024 21:20:35 +0000

The cloud has become the go-to hosting platform for enterprises, with multicloud and hybrid cloud infrastructures now the norm. However, managing cloud costs due to unmonitored growth and unanticipated spend has emerged as a significant challenge.

Cloud FinOps encompasses cloud financial management, an approach centered on bringing finance, business, engineering, and IT teams into closer alignment on cloud spend—the term “FinOps” in this case is viewed as a blend of “finance” and “DevOps” rather than traditional “financial operations.” FinOps enables finance, development, and operations teams to work together to achieve faster product delivery while managing and predicting cloud costs. In addition, it allows teams to make informed decisions on tradeoffs for speed, quality, and cost. Without a strong FinOps strategy, a company may pay for services, resources, and licenses it does not use or need.

A solid FinOps solution can improve financial performance by optimizing and reducing cloud costs. It can also provide detailed information for more informed decisions and increase transparency across IT organizations and the overall business. However, it is important to understand that FinOps approaches differ from the traditional IT procurement capitalization model in which finance identifies and signs off on costs allocated by product teams. Instead, a cross-functional FinOps team pulls together technology, business, and finance to optimize cloud vendor management, service rates, and discounting. It should also be noted that leading FinOps tools can process both CapEx and OpEx expenses.

More than a buzzword, FinOps is supported by the FinOps Foundation, a formal organization operating as a project within the global Linux Foundation, which ensures the industry delivers clear solutions and consistent definitions to establish financial accountability in cloud spending.

Business Imperative|
In modern IT environments, hybrid and multicloud infrastructures have become commonplace. However, many DevOps efforts have run into challenges with runaway costs due to unmonitored growth and unbudgeted spending. FinOps solutions provide formal tools and processes that enable IT, finance, and business organizations to collaborate on getting the maximum business value from the cloud by focusing on data-driven spending decisions. Top solutions provide near real-time data to make continuous decisions to help run the business in a cost-effective manner.

Sector Adoption Score
To help executives and decision-makers assess the potential impact and value of a cloud FinOps solution deployment to the business, this GigaOm Key Criteria report provides a structured assessment of the sector across five factors: benefit, maturity, urgency, impact, and effort. By scoring each factor based on how strongly it compels or deters adoption of a cloud FinOps solution, we provide an overall Sector Adoption Score (Figure 1) of 4.6 out of 5, with 5 indicating the strongest possible recommendation to adopt. This indicates that a cloud FinOps solution is a credible candidate for deployment and worthy of thoughtful consideration.

The factors contributing to the Sector Adoption Score for cloud FinOps are explained in more detail in the Sector Brief section that follows.

Key Criteria for Evaluating Cloud FinOps Solutions

Sector Adoption Score

Deters
Adoption

Discourages
Adoption

Merits
Consideration

Encourages
Adoption

Compels
Adoption

Source: GigaOm 2024

Figure 1. Sector Adoption Score for Cloud FinOps

This is the third year that GigaOm has reported on the cloud FinOps space in the context of our Key Criteria and Radar reports. This report builds on our previous analysis and considers how the market has evolved over the last year.

This GigaOm Key Criteria report highlights the capabilities (table stakes, key features, and emerging features) and nonfunctional requirements (business criteria) for selecting an effective cloud FinOps solution. The companion GigaOm Radar report identifies vendors and products that excel in those decision criteria. Together, these reports provide an overview of the market, identify leading cloud FinOps solution offerings, and help decision-makers evaluate these solutions so they can make a more informed investment decision.

GIGAOM KEY CRITERIA AND RADAR REPORTS

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Harnessing the Power of Cloud Performance Testing

Dana Hernandez — Tue, 26 Mar 2024 17:20:18 +0000

Cloud performance testing provides flexibility, cost savings, global reach, automation, and comprehensive insights. It’s a powerful ally in delivering high-quality applications to users.

Cloud performance testing is a crucial aspect of ensuring the reliability and efficiency of software applications hosted in cloud environments. Cloud computing technologies have achieved high adoption levels in many organizations, requiring key stakeholders on software teams to ensure applications can scale to meet demand.

That demand is driven not only by the volume of transactions, data, and processing work, but also by the wide range of users in various technology roles, including developers, testers, quality assurance (QA) personnel, development operations (DevOps) teams, performance engineers, and business analysts. Without performance testing tools, this demand would be far more difficult to meet and manage.

It is interesting that several of the cloud performance testing platforms have aligned with observability platform capabilities. The alignment allows teams to leverage the information from the observability solutions and allows users to compare performance test results with ongoing observability metrics to continue to fine-tune performance.

Another alignment taking place is that many cloud performance testing tools are becoming part of a larger testing suite for cloud capabilities. Some are becoming a part of the “shift left” trend, adding performance testing earlier in the development cycle or as a part of DevOps testing. This definitely helps to alleviate the age-old issue of testing performance right before a “go live” event only to find out that the application has performance issues. In addition, the DevOps testing suites provide reuse of functional and performance test scripts throughout the development process.

The movement to shift testing left into the development lifecycle rather than post-process—after deployment to a production or stage environment—means that business leaders can understand the performance and cost of a feature earlier in the lifecycle and better address prioritization of work (backlog items) to ensure the final solution optimizes the business value of a solution.

Ease of use for both technical and non-technical users continues to be a huge focus for vendors and companies alike. It is driving a key movement in the democratization of load testing and automated test creation. Most solutions either offer GUIs to manage tests or provide methods to record users navigating the application to create load-testing scripts automatically.

Over the next few months, I anticipate that most solutions will continue to focus on ease of use, including the use of generative AI in test creation and assessment and for test results summarization and analysis. Another ongoing focus is allowing more testers of all types to create and run tests effectively throughout the development process and ongoing operation.

From a cost perspective, these solutions continue to offer a cost-effective tiered approach to licensing to meet the needs of companies of any size. In addition, most provide some form of pay-as-you-go options for testing only as it is needed.

Cloud performance testing—with its scalability, cost-effectiveness, global reach, and automation—empowers teams to deliver high-quality performance in the cloud that meets and exceeds user expectations.

Next Steps

To learn more, take a look at GigaOm’s cloud performance testing Key Criteria and Radar reports. These reports provide a comprehensive overview of the market, outline the criteria you’ll want to consider in a purchase decision, and evaluate how a number of vendors perform against those decision criteria.

If you’re not yet a GigaOm subscriber, you can access the research using a free trial.

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Unlocking Efficiency with Enterprise Process Automation

Dana Hernandez — Fri, 22 Mar 2024 20:00:37 +0000

Enterprise process automation (EPA) is a fascinating field that strategically leverages technology to integrate, streamline, and automate business processes across an organization. EPA solutions have evolved at a breakneck pace over the last couple of years.

The convergence of intelligent document processing (IDP), robotic process automation (RPA), and business process management (BPM), along with AI, has driven a massive change in how companies and software vendors envision the product life cycle. The continued acceleration of digital transformation is leading to an increased interest in intelligent automation platforms. These solutions are increasing efficiency and cutting costs in several industries.

How to Choose the Right EPA Solution for Your Business

Market Overview
Vendors in this market today are taking a holistic approach to move beyond siloed IT and business process automation. The goal is to provide highly integrated solutions containing RPA, IDP, BPM, and process and task mining, using AI throughout the platform. The focus is on gaining greater business value and organizational agility in a highly efficient operation.

Most vendors are adding and boosting functionality to enhance no-code and low-code capabilities and tightly integrated components. Artificial intelligence (AI) has been advancing rapidly, so look for significant AI enhancements in these solutions as this EPA market evolves. Generative AI will be one of the most interesting emerging features that vendors investigate, and we anticipate that vendors will find creative and innovative ways to leverage generative AI in the near future.

To speed adoption and time to market, many vendors offer a large number of prebuilt components, templates, bots, and integrations. Some provide plug-and-play options, while others offer customization.

Buyer Requirements
Ideally, prospective customers should have a hyperautomation strategy to help guide the requirements of the solution. However, it is not necessary to have a complete vision to gain benefit from these tools. IT and business leaders should work together to determine use cases for an implementation roadmap that takes into account data readiness, ease of integration, ROI, and upstream and downstream teams, systems, and processes that are impacted.

Industry-specific and departmental functions are also key elements that need to be understood in order to compare the tools. Potential buyers should compare requirements and vendors with an eye toward performing a proof of concept (POC) with the vendor. A POC will help ensure the solution will work for an organization. It can also indicate how easy to use and to implement a solution may be.

Next Steps

EPA is not just about efficiency; it’s about transforming organizations and driving value through technology-driven processes.

To learn more, take a look at GigaOm’s EPA Key Criteria and Radar reports. These reports provide a comprehensive overview of the market, outline the criteria you’ll want to consider in a purchase decision, and evaluate how a number of vendors perform against those decision criteria.

If you’re not yet a GigaOm subscriber, you can access the research using a free trial.

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GigaOm Radar for Cloud Performance Testing

Dana Hernandez — Thu, 07 Mar 2024 16:00:03 +0000

Cloud computing technologies have achieved high adoption levels in many organizations, requiring key stakeholders on software teams to ensure applications can scale to meet demand. That demand is driven by the volume of transactions, data, and processing work, but also by the wide range of users in various technology roles, including developers, testers, quality assurance (QA) personnel, development operations (DevOps) teams, performance engineers, and business analysts. Without performance testing tools, this demand would be far more difficult to meet and manage. One related area that continues to grow is digital experience management (DEM), in which performance of applications and services is considered from the user’s point of view.

All the solutions assessed in this report are cloud-oriented and offer faster speeds and better affordability than on-premises solutions do, especially for large testing loads. Most vendors offer flexible licensing arrangements to best fit a company’s needs, ranging from pay-as-you-go models to enterprise-level tiers.

The market is evolving at a fast pace; democratization of load testing and automated test creation are two ongoing trends to watch. Most of the solutions evaluated here support either graphical user interfaces (GUIs) to manage tests or ways to record users navigating the application to create load testing scripts automatically.

This is our fourth year evaluating the cloud performance testing solutions space in the context of our Key Criteria and Radar reports. This report builds on our previous analysis and considers how the market has evolved over the last year.

This GigaOm Radar report examines nine of the top cloud performance testing solutions and compares offerings against the capabilities (table stakes, key features, and emerging features) and nonfunctional requirements (business criteria) outlined in the companion Key Criteria report. Together, these reports provide an overview of the market, identify leading cloud performance testing offerings, and help decision-makers evaluate these solutions so they can make a more informed investment decision.

GIGAOM KEY CRITERIA AND RADAR REPORTS

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GigaOm Key Criteria for Evaluating Cloud Performance Testing Solutions

Dana Hernandez — Wed, 28 Feb 2024 19:30:33 +0000

Cloud computing technologies are relatively mature and have achieved high levels of adoption in many organizations. This adoption requires stakeholders to ensure applications can scale to meet ever-growing demand. Today, these stakeholders include developers, testers, quality assurance (QA) teams, performance engineers, and business analysts. These teams leverage performance testing to ensure an application is performing as expected and users have an optimal experience. Confirming this ability to scale—in terms of users, transactions, and data and processing volumes—is accomplished using performance testing tools.

These performance testing solutions help to isolate issues and identify ways to resolve them. Cloud performance tools are evolving and becoming more robust in their ability to identify problems and bottlenecks earlier in the process. Many have the ability to pinpoint issues and possible solutions. From a database perspective, these solutions help to test and optimize configurations for cache size, bucket size, and input/output (I/O).

This review is focused on cloud-based load-testing solutions in which the ability to scale is based on leveraging hyperscale cloud economics and allowing usage-based billing. This approach expands the ease of use for load testing and removes the need to schedule projects that use limited on-premises testing capacity. Cloud testing enables an application programming interface (API) level of interaction between developers and testing capacity. It also provides automated low-cost ways for operational teams to test applications before and after changes to corporate infrastructure. Such testing reduces the need to have large pools of people online during a change control event to ensure either that their application still works after the change or that a change fixes the issue that initially prompted it.

Business Imperative
Cloud performance testing allows IT organizations to ensure maximum performance from cloud applications in a cost-effective manner. The ability to test performance parameters frequently and cost effectively allows organizations to scale applications and respond to customers’ needs. These solutions enable IT teams to test potentially millions of concurrent users around the world to ensure an application can perform. Cloud performance testing solutions are often sold in a form of “pay as you go,” by which customers are charged for cloud usage for testing only. This model makes it one of the more cost-effective ways to ensure reliability and performance of applications.

Sector Adoption Score
To help executives and decision-makers assess the potential impact and value of a cloud performance testing solution deployment to the business, this GigaOm Key Criteria report provides a structured assessment of the sector across five factors: benefit, maturity, urgency, impact, and effort. By scoring each factor based on how strongly it compels or deters adoption of a cloud performance testing solution, we provide an overall Sector Adoption Score (Figure 1) of 4.4 out of 5, with 5 indicating the strongest possible recommendation to adopt. This indicates that a cloud performance testing solution is a credible candidate for deployment and worthy of thoughtful consideration.

The factors contributing to the Sector Adoption Score for cloud performance testing solutions are explained in more detail in the Sector Brief section that follows.

Key Criteria for Evaluating Cloud Performance Testing Solutions

Sector Adoption Score

Deters
Adoption

Discourages
Adoption

Merits
Consideration

Encourages
Adoption

Compels
Adoption

Figure 1. Sector Adoption Score for Cloud Performance Testing

This is the fourth year that GigaOm has reported on the cloud performance testing space in the context of our Key Criteria and Radar reports. This report builds on our previous analysis and considers how the market has evolved over the last year.

This GigaOm Key Criteria report highlights the capabilities (table stakes, key features, and emerging features) and nonfunctional requirements (business criteria) for selecting an effective cloud performance testing solution. The companion GigaOm Radar report identifies vendors and products that excel in those decision criteria. Together, these reports provide an overview of the market, identify leading cloud performance testing solution offerings, and help decision-makers evaluate these solutions so they can make a more informed investment decision.

GIGAOM KEY CRITERIA AND RADAR REPORTS

The post GigaOm Key Criteria for Evaluating Cloud Performance Testing Solutions appeared first on Gigaom.

GigaOm Radar for E-Signature Solutions

Dana Hernandez — Mon, 12 Feb 2024 16:00:02 +0000

The e-signature market continues to show sustained and accelerated demand across virtually every industry sector. Document execution processes are a core component of most businesses, and supporting traditional physical processes for high-volume use cases is too costly and inefficient to justify them. Businesses are no longer asking if an e-signature solution should be adopted; instead, as more players enter the market, they are asking which solution to choose.

E-signature solutions have been available for decades and have matured into a robust domain that is well prepared to meet increases in market demand. Vendors continue to invest in more extensive jurisdictional support, enabling direct integration with numerous country-specific electronic identity (eID) services. Qualified digital signatures (QES) were once considered advanced functionality but are now more commonplace (as shown in Figure 1), with leading solutions offering five or more integrated trusted service providers (TSPs) in addition to supporting the Electronic Signatures in Global and National Commerce Act (E-SIGN Act) and the Uniform Electronic Transactions Act (UETA) in the US.

Figure 1. Requirements for Legally Binding Signatures: Simple, Advanced, and Qualified

Similarly, identity authentication methods have expanded as well, with many solutions offering advanced features to verify signees, including video, document verification, and biometric functionality. Aside from documents that are still legally not in scope for electronic execution (for example, wills and court orders), even the most complex international use cases can be supported by multiple vendor offerings.

Beyond core compliance, almost the entire market of customers has started or continued to invest in end-to-end document management software. Commonly referred to as contract lifecycle management (CLM), this investment expands e-signature functionality to other document functions, such as creation, negotiation, and post-execution processing. This represents a shift in how businesses view e-signatures: no longer as a point solution but as part of a broader transformation strategy that aims to drive automation and digitization across all document activities.

As a result, broader platforms have started integrating other workflow capabilities within e-signature products, blurring the line between document management and this solution space. Often, e-signatures are the entry point but quickly become part of a multiple-product package whose components work together within an ecosystem to produce more comprehensive transformation. Feature-focused offerings are investing in similar expansion as well, though they’re more heavily reliant on native functionality combined with expanded third-party integration options. One example is data field configuration, which now commonly enables automated population of and extraction into domain systems, thus supporting requirements before and after the e-signature function.

To be a significant player in this space, an e-signature solution must support the core e-signature process—preparation, distribution, execution—and offer extensive compliance support, scalability for high-volume use cases, and flexibility across a range of countries, languages, and interfaces. Functionality that simply allows a user to draw a signature on a document is not sufficient to be considered a solution for this report. Recent entrants Microsoft and Google are excluded for this reason, but expect them to be more significant alternatives in the near future.

This is our third year evaluating the e-signature space in the context of our Key Criteria and Radar reports. This report builds on our previous analysis and considers how the market has evolved over the last year.

This GigaOm Radar report examines 14 of the top e-signature solutions in the market and compares offerings against the capabilities (table stakes, key features, and emerging features) and non-functional requirements (business criteria) outlined in the companion Key Criteria report. Together, these reports provide an overview of the market, identify leading e-signature offerings, and help decision-makers evaluate these solutions so they can make a more informed investment decision.

GIGAOM KEY CRITERIA AND RADAR REPORTS

The GigaOm Key Criteria report provides a detailed decision framework for IT and executive leadership assessing enterprise technologies. Each report defines relevant functional and non-functional aspects of solutions in a sector. The Key Criteria report informs the GigaOm Radar report, which provides a forward-looking assessment of vendor solutions in the sector.

The post GigaOm Radar for E-Signature Solutions appeared first on Gigaom.

GigaOm Key Criteria for Evaluating E-Signature Solutions

Dana Hernandez — Thu, 01 Feb 2024 15:53:18 +0000

E-signature technology—which enables businesses to record signatures, initials, dates, and other data on electronic documents rather than needing physical documents—continues to be defined by rapidly increasing demand across virtually every industry and market around the world. This momentum is driven in part by remote operating models and distributed work forces, often replacing traditional document processes bound by physical limitations. This demand has helped fuel a growing set of technology features that continue to mature and provide legal credibility for virtually any document type.

Most jurisdictions formally recognize e-signatures as a legal alternative to handwritten wet ink on paper and, in some cases, consider digital execution to be more secure and legally sound than traditional physical methods.

The core competency of an e-signature technology is the ability to execute a document in a digital and legal manner. To satisfy this requirement, a full solution encompasses the following capabilities:

Preparation: The ability to upload a digital version of a document, specify data capture requirements, and define a desired workflow.
Distribution: The ability to digitally and securely send a document and specific instructions to a signee using the specified workflow.
Execution: The ability to sign a document in a legally compliant fashion. This is defined by the local jurisdiction but most often includes identity verification, audits, and accessible storage functionality.

Solutions in this space allow organizations to upload existing documents, apply digital capture fields, and deliver requests and signing instructions to recipients securely via email. Providers that are compliant with local regulations offer signee authentication, audit certificates, and record storage to establish a legally binding result for all parties.

More comprehensive tooling that supports contract lifecycle management (CLM), document creation, collaboration, and digitization via optical character recognition (OCR) or natural language processing (NLP) is out of scope for this report.

E-signature technologies range from freeware and limited-volume trials to enterprise-level subscription services. Solutions can be fully cloud-based or support on-premises software and storage. Organizations should consider the types of documents they process along with the volume of documents and the number of internal teams utilizing the service. Common limiting factors include the ways existing documents are created or stored and what organizational frameworks are available to dictate prioritization and manage access across multiple business units.

Business Imperative
Organizations adopting e-signature solutions benefit from enhanced customization, transparency, and speed when executing documents. Users can specify multistage routing requirements, customize where and what data is captured, and track external actions taken by the recipient. Signees can access the document from virtually any interface, ensuring frictionless execution on both sides of the transaction.

Cost savings and efficiencies are highly scalable because most document types and use cases can be enhanced by an e-signature solution.

Sector Adoption Score
To help executives and decision-makers assess the potential impact and value of an e-signature solution deployment to the business, this GigaOm Key Criteria report provides a structured assessment of the e-signature sector across five factors: benefit, maturity, urgency, impact, and effort. By scoring each factor based on how strongly it compels or deters adoption of e-signature solutions, we provide an overall Sector Adoption Score (Figure 1) for e-signature solutions of 4.6 out of 5, with 5 indicating the strongest possible recommendation to adopt. This indicates that e-signature is a credible candidate for deployment and worth thoughtful consideration.

The factors contributing to the Sector Adoption Score for e-signature solutions are explained in more detail in the Sector Brief section that follows.

Key Criteria for Evaluating E-Signature Solutions

Sector Adoption Score

Deters
Adoption

Discourages
Adoption

Merits
Consideration

Encourages
Adoption

Compels
Adoption

Figure 1. Sector Adoption Score for E-Signature Solutions

This is the third year that GigaOm has reported on the e-signature solution space in the context of our Key Criteria and Radar reports. This report builds on our previous analysis and considers how the market has evolved over the last year.

This GigaOm Key Criteria report highlights the capabilities (table stakes, key features, and emerging features) and non-functional requirements (business criteria) for selecting an effective e-signature solution. The companion GigaOm Radar report identifies vendors and products that excel in those decision criteria. Together, these reports provide an overview of the market and its underlying technology, identify leading e-signature offerings, and help decision-makers evaluate these solutions so they can make a more informed investment decision.

GIGAOM KEY CRITERIA AND RADAR REPORTS

The GigaOm Key Criteria report provides a detailed decision framework for IT and executive leadership assessing enterprise technologies. Each report defines relevant functional and non-functional aspects of solutions in a sector. The Key Criteria report informs the GigaOm Radar report, which provides a forward-looking assessment of vendor solutions in the sector.

The post GigaOm Key Criteria for Evaluating E-Signature Solutions appeared first on Gigaom.

Dana Hernandez, Author at Gigaom

GigaOm Radar for Value Stream Management (VSM)

GIGAOM KEY CRITERIA AND RADAR REPORTS

GigaOm Key Criteria for Evaluating Value Stream Management (VSM) Solutions

Key Criteria for Evaluating VSM Solutions

Sector Adoption Score

DetersAdoption

DiscouragesAdoption

MeritsConsideration

EncouragesAdoption

CompelsAdoption

GIGAOM KEY CRITERIA AND RADAR REPORTS

GigaOm Radar for Cloud FinOps

GIGAOM KEY CRITERIA AND RADAR REPORTS

GigaOm Key Criteria for Evaluating Cloud FinOps Solutions

Key Criteria for Evaluating Cloud FinOps Solutions

Sector Adoption Score

DetersAdoption

DiscouragesAdoption

MeritsConsideration

EncouragesAdoption

CompelsAdoption

GIGAOM KEY CRITERIA AND RADAR REPORTS

Harnessing the Power of Cloud Performance Testing

Next Steps

Unlocking Efficiency with Enterprise Process Automation

How to Choose the Right EPA Solution for Your Business

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GigaOm Radar for Cloud Performance Testing

GIGAOM KEY CRITERIA AND RADAR REPORTS

GigaOm Key Criteria for Evaluating Cloud Performance Testing Solutions

Key Criteria for Evaluating Cloud Performance Testing Solutions

Sector Adoption Score

DetersAdoption

DiscouragesAdoption

MeritsConsideration

EncouragesAdoption

CompelsAdoption

GIGAOM KEY CRITERIA AND RADAR REPORTS

GigaOm Radar for E-Signature Solutions

GIGAOM KEY CRITERIA AND RADAR REPORTS

GigaOm Key Criteria for Evaluating E-Signature Solutions

Key Criteria for Evaluating E-Signature Solutions

Sector Adoption Score

DetersAdoption

DiscouragesAdoption

MeritsConsideration

EncouragesAdoption

CompelsAdoption

GIGAOM KEY CRITERIA AND RADAR REPORTS

Deters
Adoption

Discourages
Adoption

Merits
Consideration

Encourages
Adoption

Compels
Adoption

Deters
Adoption

Discourages
Adoption

Merits
Consideration

Encourages
Adoption

Compels
Adoption

Deters
Adoption

Discourages
Adoption

Merits
Consideration

Encourages
Adoption

Compels
Adoption

Deters
Adoption

Discourages
Adoption

Merits
Consideration

Encourages
Adoption

Compels
Adoption