Before Cloud, there was SaaS providers, before that, ASP’s.  With Cloud Computing being the shiny new thing in the Enterprise and IT space over the past 18 or so months, people often forget its roots that have driven early Cloud adoption in Software-as-a-Service.  A handful early pioneers paved the way for SaaS and Cloud adoption by spending hard time, and money, to educate the market on its benefits, opening the door for various market and application segments to jump on board.  In this series we will profile the successful companies leveraging/delivering applications and services via web/cloud technologies.  First up is e-Signature service EchoSign.

Founded in 2005 EchoSign with the mission of delivering e-Signature for legal contracts via the web  EchoSign is fully coming into its own over the past year.  We caught up with co-founder Jason Lemkin recently to talk about how the company got to where it is, and how they see the masses adopting web technologies in droves.

The down economy that kicked off in 2008 did not mean bad news for all businesses, especially a SaaS org like EchoSign.  They saw impressive growth through 2009, especially in the second half of the year.  Back in the day, much like all early SaaS vendors,  there was a particular learning curve for potential customers to be educated on the benefits of SaaS.  Acting much like a united front, early SaaS vendors all pitched, prodded, and educated the market across many application types and verticals.

Nowadays the average business is running some, if not all, of their applications via the web.  Choosing to adopt a SaaS strategy for contracts and signatures is a safe and optimal choice, not only for great time and cost savings, but also because they are conducting a vast majority of their business online.

EchoSign rode the cost-savings wave of hyper SaaS/Cloud adoption during the downturn to a current day total customer base approaching 20,000 strong.  Its not only the breadth of use cases, from recruiting, field-service, to real estate and beyond, but also the volume of usage on the system.  They now see over a million users on the service and orgs such as BT to the tune of around 30,000 signatures a month.

With their release EchoSign Global Edition the future looks very bright for international expansion on all fronts.  They are currently seeing around 35% of their revenue come from outside the U.S.  As SaaS and Cloud help more and more orgs conduct business globally this will of course play very well in favor of EchoSign’s global and multi-lingual strategy.

Besides international expansion EchoSign sees great potential growth in, where else, the mobile sector.  Currently the company sees around 8% of its transactions happening in a ‘mobile’ nature, either via a portable netbook or one of their mobile phone solutions.  That number is sure to grow as mobile continues to soar with new use devices and use cases popping up left and right.

We will continue our Kickin $aaS coverage over the up and coming weeks/months.  For those who will be in the SF Bay Area the week of May 1oth and are interested in Sotware-as-a-Service and where its headed, check out the SaaS Summit & SIIA On-Demand event.