Much of what a company knows arrives not as a record in a system, but as a document:
- an invoice as a PDF
- an insurance claim as a scanned page
- a contract of forty pages that nobody has read since it was signed
Take the fan maker in Coimbatore from Market Segment 10.1, ERP and business accounting software. Its supplier invoices arrive as PDFs. Its factory drawings, quality certificates and supplier contracts pile up in folders. And it is about to sign a supply contract with a large retail chain.
This Market Segment is about the companies that deal with the document itself. Their buyers are companies' finance, operations and legal teams. It runs in the order a document passes through a company, in three sub-segments:
Reading the document: software that turns a scan or a PDF into fields a system can use. This used to be called optical character recognition (OCR). It is now called intelligent document processing.
Keeping the document: content-management systems that store, version and govern the millions of documents a company builds up.
Signing it: the electronic signature that replaced the courier, and the contract platform that grew around it.
Most of the weight is at the end. One Bengaluru centre, Docusign's, has well over half of this Market Segment's job postings. It is Docusign's largest engineering site outside the United States.
Two companies covered mainly in other Market Segments change the scale of this one:
Adobewhose Acrobat created the PDF format and whose Adobe Sign competes with Docusign. In Bengaluru and Delhi NCR, it has nearly as many job postings as the rest of this Market Segment together.
VIDAwhich supplies the digital signature certificate on which a legally valid signature rests.
Software that manages the contract as a legal document, through its whole life, is called contract lifecycle management. (More on it in Market Segment 43.1, Contract lifecycle management (CLM) software, in Industry Vertical 43, Legaltech.)
Every company named here has posted software engineering jobs in India. Famous companies that don't actively hire software engineers in India are left out.
Reading the document
Intelligent document processing, OCR and data extraction, invoice and claims automation
Back to the fan maker's supplier invoices from the start of this Market Segment. Turning a scanned page into text is an old problem, and for decades it was solved badly. What changed is that AI models now read a document the way a clerk does. They find the invoice total wherever the supplier happened to put it. The companies in this sub-segment read the document, and feed its fields into the system that needs them.
Nanonetsfounded in Bengaluru, has engineers there and in Delhi, and the most job postings in this sub-segment. It is the largest Indian-founded company in this Market Segment. Its models pull the fields out of invoices, purchase orders and forms, and feed them into accounts payable, the team and system that pay suppliers.
Infrrdalso Indian-founded and in Bengaluru, does the same for the hardest documents: mortgage files and insurance claims, where a mistake costs money.
Instabasewas founded by an Indian engineer out of MIT, and has engineers in Bengaluru. It sells the platform on which a bank builds its own document applications, from pulling out the fields to searching across everything the bank holds.
ABBYYwith engineers in Bengaluru, is the oldest name in this category. For twenty years, its recognition engine sat inside most products for capturing documents. It has also added process and task mining, to follow the document into the process. (More on process mining in Market Segment 10.3, RPA, process mining and low-code platforms.)
The document read like a person reads it.
Since language models like the one behind ChatGPT arrived, this business has flipped. A model no longer needs a template for each supplier's invoice. Reading documents has become a feature of the language model, rather than a product of its own. So the companies here are moving up: from reading the document to running the process it starts.
Keeping the document
Enterprise content management, document management, PDF tools
Back to the fan maker's drawings, certificates and contracts from the start of this Market Segment. The companies in this sub-segment store them. Their systems keep every version of a document, control who may open it, and decide how long it must be kept. This is called enterprise content management.
OpenTextwith engineers in Bengaluru and Hyderabad, is the largest enterprise content-management company in the world. Banks, governments and manufacturers keep and govern their documents in it. Through a long series of acquisitions, it owns much of this category's history. Its Bengaluru centre is one of its largest.
Hylandwith job postings in Hyderabad and Kolkata, is the other large content-management company. It is strongest in healthcare, government and insurance.
Somneticsfrom Kolkata, is the Indian document-management and workflow company. Its products run the document flows of Indian companies and public bodies.
Foxitwith engineers in Delhi, sells the PDF tools that compete with Adobe Acrobat.
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Signing it
Electronic signature, contract and document generation, digital signature certificates
Back to the fan maker's supply contract with the retail chain, from the start of this Market Segment. Both sides sign it online, without a courier. Two terms matter here:
Electronic signatureany way of signing electronically, such as clicking to sign a PDF.
Digital signature certificatea certificate that ties the signature to a verified person, using encryption. It makes the signature legally stronger, and in some countries it is required.
An electronic signature can be as simple as clicking to sign a PDF, while a digital signature certificate first checks who the signer is and seals the signature with encryption, which makes it legally stronger.
This is where most of this Market Segment's weight is.
Docusignwith engineers in Bengaluru, made the electronic signature the standard way to complete an agreement. Since then, it has been turning the signature into a platform for the whole agreement: drafting it, negotiating it, signing it, and searching what was agreed. Its Bengaluru centre is its largest engineering site outside the United States.
Congawith engineers in Bengaluru, generates documents from the data in Salesforce: the quote, the proposal and the contract. It adds the signature at the end. (More on it in Market Segment 14.5, CPQ, pricing and RFP software, in Industry Vertical 14, CRM and sales tech.)
Two companies covered mainly in other Market Segments also sign:
Adobecreated the PDF with Acrobat, and its Adobe Sign competes with Docusign. Most of its job postings in Bengaluru and Delhi NCR are for its creative and marketing products. (More on it in Market Segment 13.5, Creative tools, event platforms and creator marketing, in Industry Vertical 13, Martech.)
VIDAsupplies the digital signature certificates and the identity checks that make an electronic signature legally binding in Indonesia and its other markets. (More on it in Market Segment 4.3, KYC, identity verification and fraud prevention, in Industry Vertical 4, Cybersecurity.)
So a document at the fan maker from the start of this Market Segment goes through three steps. It is read into the system, kept safely for as long as the rules require, and signed without a courier.
A document at the fan maker goes through three steps after it arrives: it is read into the system, kept for as long as the rules require, and signed without a courier, with different companies at each step.