Going paperless and electronic signatures with EchoSign from Adobe.

1. July 2011
Greener E-Signatures
An Update from EchoSign eSignature from Adobe - The Way the Web Signs
THE LATEST FROM ECHOSIGN employees. Since 2006, we’ve been in a passively cooled office in
downtown Palo Alto with cinderblock walls which naturally maintais an
A Greener Shade of Green ambient temperature 95% of the year with minimal HVAC drain.
JUL 27, 2011
The bottom line with Adobe and EchoSign together now, is that it gets
even better.
Now, EchoSign’s offices are Platinum-LEED certified, complete with —
this is pretty cool — on-site windmills (see pic above of one of them)
and Bloom energy fuel-cell generators which power over 30% of
on-site energy needs. Even our cafeteria (see below) only permits
composting or recycling - extra work, but impactful, as 97% of waste is
diverted from landfill.
With a green product, servers, server power, and now Platinum-LEED
offices, we feel like it’s all another big step in the right direction.
Being authentically green has always been important to us at EchoSign.
Going paperless for your contracts is, inherently, a more
environmentally-friendly process than paper (particularly from a water
standpoint), and we’re pleased to have won numerous green awards and
recognition together with our customers including Aetna, CIGNA, BT,
and many others. We’re also proud to have partnered with the National
Arbor Day Foundation since 2006 to plant trees on behalf of our
customers.
But what about the servers themselves — and the offices where we work
to build EchoSign and provide the human side of the service?
Since 2007, our servers have been “100% wind-powered” in that we’ve
purchased renewable, wind-powered offsets to balance out all the energy
costs of our servers, and where practical, used energy-efficient
configurations at our SAS 70 Type II datacenters at our customer and
partner Rackspace.
More recently, in 2010, we moved to a virtual machine environment
using our customer and partner VMWare’s software which enables ~ 3x
the document throughput per CPU (using quad-core systems which now
image documents in parallel on each core), cutting CPU power
requirements (the most energy-taxing part of our service) by almost
50%.
But even with wind-powered carbon offsets, and VMware virtualization,
and paperless contracts, our headcount has grown to scores of EchoSign