Awards, Acknowledgements and Certificates

Prof. Dr. Bernd Venohr, Head of the Department of Strategic Management at the University of Economics and Law in Berlin, identified SOFTPRO as the world’s leading company  for signature management. 

Prof. Dr. Venohr initiated the first research project to identify companies which can be classified as world market leaders according to solid scientific criteria - beyond the inflationary use of this term as a marketing buzz word.  

SOFTPRO became part of the "Encyclopedia about Germany's World Market Leaders" - a hand-picked selection of companies delivering best products and services. The encycopedia lists very well-known household brands and highly specialized niche market players.

SOFTPRO is mentioned in several Gartner publications like

• North American and European Electronic Signature Suite and Service Market, Gartner ID 173599, published 2010-01-04, p. 15
• Case Study for Industry Collaboration: CECA Signature Solution Cuts Costs and Drives Revenue, Gartner ID 171092, published 2009-10-05, p. 7
 

Frost & Sullivan (F&S) honored SOFTPRO with "Global Customer Service Leadership Award" for having excelled in serving its customers and gaining superior customer satisfaction levels. The award recognizes the company has gained best insights into customer needs and product demands. 

According to F&S SOFTPRO has identified emerging trends before they became the standard in the marketplace, and has created advanced technologies that will catalyze industries in the near future.

 "New image-based signature verification tools, such as FraudOne^®, provide an opportunity to systematically review more signatures at a lower dollar threshold than is feasible with the current, manual signature review process. These tools greatly reduce today's high false positive rates for counterfeit and forgery."

quoted from "Strategies for Mitigating Fraud Risks Associated with the Check Clearing in the 21st Century Act"

SOFTPRO partner Confederación Española de Cajas de Ahorros (CECA, the Spanish Savings Banks Confederation) uses SignWare SDK and SignPads in their lighthouse project “Firma Digitalizada” (digitized signature). They received the Innovation Award of the European association for IT security association TeleTrusT in 2009.

The jury honored the innovative hybrid approach to combine the benefits of Biometrics, Cryptography and Public Key Infrastructures (PKI) for authentication purposes.

The project became a blue print for other organizations for the trustworthy implementation of handwritten signatures in electronic processes and won multiple additional awards and received broad recognition.

In October 2010 CECAs CIO - Santiago Uriel Arias - summed up experiences of the project at ISSE conference. A detailed report was published in the conference proceedings.  

• June 2010 - FT The Banker: "Award for Innovation in Information Security"
  ("The striking use of authentication controls as a business enabler marked Firma Digitalizada out for this year's award: not only has it allowed the participating banks to dispense with paper but it has facilitated the transformation of front- and back-office processes and the customer experience.")
• December 2009 - Bank Technology News (btn) [USA]: “Top 10 Companies and Technologies”
• November 2009 - Banking Technology [UK] Rating as “highly commended” in the category “Most Innovative Use of IT"

A substantial part of CECA's inspiration for this solution was based on the vital exchange with German Savings Banks, which also rely on hardware and software from SOFTPRO. TeleTrusT

February 2004: SignDoc won Microsoft's "Tablet PC Challenge“ in Germany among 70 submissions from Independent Software Vendors.

December 2004: "Does Your Application Think in Ink?“ - The Microsoft developer contest attracted 260 submissions of indenpendent software vendors from all over the world: SignDoc was voted "Best Biometrics Application" and "Best Business Application" for Tablet PCs.

TÜV Saarland, a member of the German Technical Inspection Association Group (Technischer Überwachungs-Verein, TÜV) confirms the easy and safe operation of SignDoc Desktop and SignDoc Web.

SignDoc was tested in conjunctoion with the signature tablet SignPad eSignio. The experts agree that users can be confident that the documents signed at a SignPad and stored in SignDoc be complete, detailed and processed in a secure manner.

The Electronic Signature - and the document associated with it - are protected against manipulation attempts and fundamental transmission errors have been systematically excluded.

tekit Consult Bonn GmbH is the organisation which executes tests for the approval of the TÜV as "Approved Software" http://www.tekit.de

Companies carrying this seal share a specific dedication for excellence in secure IT products and outstanding data protection of data. These values reflect the German passion for technology as well as honouring the privacy of IT users whether as a corporate or a private user. The criteria are defined by TeleTrusT, the leading European association for IT security. Screening potential candidates for this quality seal and monitored existing ones is one of the many tasks of the working group "IT Security made in Germany".

In displaying this seal SOFTPRO declares to comply with the following value propositions uniting companies working under the umbrella of "IT Security made in Germany"
1. providing trustworthy IT solutions
2. offering products without backdoors ("hidden access for third parties")
3. being headquartered in Germany
4. having research and development centered in Germany
5. complying with German laws and regulations for data protection

One of the examples confirming SOFTPROs commitment to trustworthy solutions is documented in the certification of some of its solutions by the German Technical Inspection Association Group (Technischer Überwachungs-Verein, TÜV) .

The seal was established in October 2011. SOFTPRO was one of the first successful applicants. For aditional information see the website of 
IT Security made in Germany  
Note: The initiative "IT Security made in Germany" (ITSMIG) was transferred from an independent organisation into a working group of TeleTrusT in 2011. Some of the recent changes are not reflected on the webpage of ITSMIG.