Dale W. Combs, co-owner of D Squared Holdings, Inc. and its related and subsidiary companies Third Party Verification, Inc. (3PV), AssureSign LLC and Marketing Systems Group, Inc. (MSG) announced that effective January 1, 2010 he has retired from his position as President and Chief Technical Officer.  Combs will maintain part-time involvement through mid-year while continuing his ownership interest.   Along with chief executive officer David W. Brinkman, Combs co-founded Marketing Systems Group in 1991.  Brinkman will continue to oversee daily operations of the businesses as President and CEO, while Combs will be involved only in high-level strategy and business decisions.

MSG continues to bring innovative solutions to customers, including its very first customer, signed in 1991, who is still a customer today. 3PV spun-off from MSG in 2001, and has grown to be the recognized market leader in third party verification services. 3PV was named to the Inc. 500/5000 list of fastest growing privately held companies in 2008. In 2006, AssureSign spun-off from 3PV, quickly becoming a leader in integrated electronic signature solutions via a software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering. The companies collectively have been named to the Orlando Sentinel’s Top 100 Companies for Working Families in 2006, 2007 and 2008.

“We’ve planned this transition for quite some time and I’m confident that Dave and his team are very capable of moving the business forward.  I have had the privilege of working with many talented and dynamic professionals and I will miss the organization a great deal, but it is time for me to move to a new chapter in my life,” Combs said. “I’m looking forward to spending time with family, and pursuing other activities including traveling.”

 “Dale and I have done a tremendous job building a world-class organization, and he leaves behind a very capable team.” said Brinkman.

Not to sound cliché as this has certainly been used a lot this week, but AssureSign will take a ‘Giant Leap’ next week when the new AssureSign for Salesforce CRM 2.0 is released.  Since inception, the power of AssureSign has been recognized most when integrated with existing business processes.  AssureSign’s API capabilities via DocumentNOW® and DocumentTRAK™, allowing our ability to dynamically create documents for signature from ‘other systems’, has always been at the core of our customer implementations and has contributed to their success with AssureSign.  AssureSign was the first electronic signature solution to create documents dynamically using Salesforce data fields; the first to offer the ability to sign in-person from within Salesforce and the first to secure biometric signatures using a mouse.

So, what is the giant leap?  Well, we believe that AssureSign will be the first and only electronic signature AppExchange partner to have 100% ApexCode integration along with a VisualForce user interface.  AssureSign has completely redesigned its Salesforce Integration Tool by replacing custom S-Control code and integration with a 100% ApexCode.  This means a much cleaner, broader, deeper and tighter integration with Salesforce.  AssureSign customers have always enjoyed comprehensive integration, but here are some highlights that are new or improved:

• New look-and-feel leveraging VisualForce
• Dynamically create documents with fields from ANY Salesforce tab or custom object data
• New views and UI for in-person signing or counter-signing (also known as immediate presentment of documents)
• AssureSign-side Wizard for exporting completed documents back into Salesforce or other data stores
• Ability to initiate workflow upon receipt of document status change OR completed documents via AssureSign-side Wizard
• Easy to select data elements (fields from any tab or custom object data) for integration with dynamic document creation via AssureSign templates and workflows
• New views of document progress status and ability to create unique dashboards
• Easier Setup and ‘New Release Update’ reminders

Look for more information next week as AssureSign takes a ‘giant leap’ when AssureSign for Salesforce CRM 2.0 is officially released.

Early on in our childhood, we were all told that the early bird gets the worm.  At least this was always drummed into me as my father tried to get me up for school in the morning back in the 50s.  The same applies to the world of transacting business.  It’s very important when executing contracts, agreements, and other documents required when consummating a business transaction, to have them done as quickly as possible. In a sales situation it is always prudent to close the sale as quickly as possible after a customer verbally agrees to the transaction.

In our architectural design of AssureSign, we were always cognizant of the goal to make the product work in an efficient manner to facilitate quick setup and signatory presentment.  Since AssureSign operates as an application operating in the Web 2.0 cloud, we wanted to provide the ability for our clients to take advantage of integration tools to make the submission as seamless as possible.  The first generation of AssureSign allowed users to manually upload documents for setup and transmittal to signatories.

In the second generation we developed an integration toolset called DocumentNOW®.  The DocumentNOW toolkit allows a customer to build XML identifying AssureSign templates, signatories, or other data needed to setup a document for signature to one or many signatories.  In addition, the client has the ability to specify a local file location on their domain to which the document can be automatically uploaded, so the user doesn’t have to manually upload files.  This creates the ability for the client to make the submission, setup, and signatory presentment a completely automated process, depending on the amount of integration programming they want to implement.

What’s in store for 2009 and the future?  The DocumentNOW toolkit allows us to coincide with other cloud applications such as salesforce.com, as we provide as a current offering, and will continue to exploit that ability. We are looking to add further strength to our authentication capability, researching new methods in the use of wizards to help new users set up components such as signing ceremony workflows and notifications, and also configuring abilities for our advanced users to micro-manage each detailed step, from setup to signing.

On the engineering team at AssureSign, we have accumulated many ideas from our day to day development as well as ideas from our current and prospective clients.  Those ideas are under constant review by all divisions of the company for possible inclusion and positioning for production.  We are all “early birds” in engineering, and strive to make this product the most efficient, expedient, and productive electronic signature product on the market.

Just another in a long list of exciting changes we’ve been introducing for the last 18 months. Speaking of changes, let me give you a glance at AssureSign’s heritage. The history starts back in 1991 when Dale Combs and I started Marketing Systems Group. Anchored primarily in the telecommunications sector with one primary customer (United Telephone/Sprint/EMBARQ), we leveraged our out-of-the-box thinking and our “strategic solutions” moniker to allow this customer to realize uncommon success without having to reinvest in hardware, software and the like. Our solutions were provided in a hosted environment, today recognized more commonly as Software-as-a-Service or SaaS. EMBARQ is still a customer of MSG and to date we’ve processed more than 20 million transactions.

Given an excellent relationship and being recognized as “being able to do anything” with then Sprint, we were approached about providing third party verification (TPV) services in as regulated requirement for long distance providers. TPV’s are essentially recorded verbal contracts and are required to change your long distance carrier or to port your wireline phone number to another carrier. We saw this as a challenge and an opportunity to expand our services and customer base. Through a brief prototype and evaluation process, the services provided were adopted and moved to 3000 desktops throughout Sprint’s local telephone company infrastructure. From there Third Party Verification, Inc. was formed and is now known more commonly within the industry as 3PV. 3PV’s customers include 7 of the top 10 cable companies, Voice over IP providers and traditional phone providers throughout North America.

A product developed to help Vonage shorten the lead-time to turn up customers that wished to transfer their current local number as eLOA or electronic Letter of Agency. eLOA is an electronic signature product in all facets as defined by eSign and UETA. In 2005 alone 3PV helped its customers collect over 2 million electronic authorizations for the e911 Information and Education project mandated by the FCC. Within the past month 3PV celebrated 20 million electronic and verbal contract verifications, all provided in a SaaS environment.

This all leads us to AssureSign. AssureSign, LLC was formally launched as its own company after being conceived in the MSG/3PV incubator in 2006. AssureSign, leveraging the infrastructure and experience used to deliver over 40 million electronic transactions for both MSG and 3PV, has grown from a concept of collecting an electronic signature to full-featured document management system. The same innovation has come into play again with our DocumentNow™ XML interface and our integration with the industry leading CRM, Salesforce. The forward thinking design and inherently flexible applications allow our customers to develop and integrate their own electronic signature processes using AssureSign. The AssureSign engineers are busy developing our next two releases which will be similarly innovative and provide even more flexibility to adapt AssureSign into any business process.

This blog will continue to document the progress of AssureSign, its innovations and benchmarks.