Barracuda Aims To Disrupt E-Signature Market At $1 Price Point

Barracuda Networks Tuesday unveiled a cloud-based e-signature solution called CudaSign that is priced at $1 per user, per month -- a fraction of the $10 to $20 competitors DocuSign and EchoSign charge per user, per month.

Barracuda, Campbell, Calif., said the price drop coincides with a rebranding of its SignNow e-signature business, which it acquired in 2013. Barracuda said that starting Tuesday its SignNow suite of e-signature solutions would be streamlined and renamed named CudaSign. The name change also impacts its SignNow Appliance, which now becomes CudaSign Premium.

’We are changing the e-signature market rules,’ said Chris Hawkins, general manager of e-signatures at Barracuda and co-founder of SignNow. ’For a long time only a chosen few in companies had access to e-signature tools. We’d like to see that change and bring digital signatures to more people behind the firewall and to the underserved SMB market. By making it affordable for anyone in a company to use e-signature services, hopefully they will flourish.’

[Related: Top 50 Midmarket IT Vendor Executives For 2014 ]

Hawkins said the aggressive price point is an attempt to win e-signature market share and drive higher-value sales of Barracuda storage and security solutions.

According to Thor Clark, director of engineering at Barracuda, the bigger the footprint SignNow has, the more opportunity Barracuda and its partners have when it comes to driving higher-value sales.

’This is not a huge channel play. But it’s a really excellent product and I want all my customers using it,’ said Bill Hogan, president of WebHouse, a Barracuda partner based in Baldwin, N.Y. "CudaSign is a unique door-opener that the competition doesn’t have. Once that door is open, and customers get to know Barracuda, they are happy to consider other products."

CudaSign allows businesses to collect signatures, sign and return contracts, keep track of document status on a real-time basis for quick turnaround and compliance, and facilitate an audit trail for documents. It’s HIPAA-compliant and works with existing e-document workflow solutions from Salesforce, SharePoint, Office365 and Google.

SignNow has more than 2 million customers, including more than 100,000 small businesses and more than half of the Fortune 500, according to Barracuda. CudaSign enters a crowded field of e-document signature companies that support digital signatures using smartphones and tablets, including DocuSign and EchoSign.

’At the $1-per-user price point, Barracuda has the first-mover advantage. They will take the market by storm,’ Hogan said. ’They are going to own this market before the competition even figures out what just happened.’

PUBLISHED MARCH 3, 2015