David Whitton, the Regional Sales Director for Middle East and Africa at Kodak Alaris, says the company plans to help companies solve their information management challenges.
What is the primary focus of your participation at this year’s GITEX?
As Middle East organizations embark on their digital transformation journeys, Kodak Alaris intends to highlight how it can solve their information management challenges through its participation at GITEX 2016. Under the theme ‘Digitize your City’, the company will showcase its latest solutions for reigning in Data Chaos to enable core business functions – from marketing to logistics to finance – to reduce costs and improve overall results.
Kodak Alaris hosted one of GITEX’s ‘Breakfast Briefings’ today for a select group of CIOs from the financial industry. The company also showcased document and information management solutions for the Government, Healthcare and Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) segments.
What is the relevance of this show to your business in the region?
Gitex is the biggest event of the year for Kodak Alaris in EMEA along with other trade shows such as CeBit in Germany and Documation in France. It is the perfect platform for us to launch products to the Middle Eastern Market as we know that business people and decision makers from all over the region come to GITEX. It is a time where the most cutting edge technology and business solutions are on display, and Kodak Alaris wants to be in the thick of it.
Kodak Alaris has been investing considerably in the Gulf region, opening dedicated service centres in Dubai, Riyadh, Jeddah, Dammam and Khamis Mushait, providing fast local support for organizations using both Kodak and third party scanners. We have plans to expand further in the MENA region, continuing to help make our customers more competitive through our innovative solutions.
By participating at Gitex, we hope to build on this momentum and engage with regional IT decision makers from enterprises across a wide range of industries. Hopefully these discussions will translate into additional business and partnerships for Kodak Alaris in the near future.
What kind of products and solutions are you showcasing at the event?
Kodak Alaris will use GITEX as a platform to unveil innovative solutions such as the Kodak i5850S Scanner, its new high-volume production scanner that offers three-pocket sorting capabilities, designed for the extreme scanning demands of service bureaus, business process outsourcing organizations and corporate scanning departments. The scanner, with integrated stacking and unlimited volume capacity – offers meaningful benefits, including saving of money, time and trees by reusing separator sheets. It also automatically separates short documents from other pages detects and separates multi-feed documents, and flags documents that need special post-scan handling.
Also showcased will be the company’s new robust, compact and highly affordable i3300 Scanner, enabling organizations to go paperless and scan a variety of document types in a fast and reliable way. The scanner is ideal for general office settings in a wide range of industries and vertical markets, including government, banking, insurance, healthcare, and Business Process Outsourcing (BPO). It scans at 70 pages per minute and makes it possible to extract critical data from documents and seamlessly feed it into a business process or workflow. The i3300 Scanner includes an easy-to-use control panel designed to shorten the learning curve for new users.
What steps are you taking in terms of enabling your customers for the ‘smart’ future?
A major challenge for businesses in recent years has been the exponential growth in the volumes of unstructured data, which is not only more challenging to manage, but is often overlooked for data analysis. Organizations today are managing data from more sources, and increasingly the nature of this data is unstructured – leading to what we call Data Chaos. Digital transformation presents a clear roadmap to address these challenges. Done right, it will optimize critical business processes by enabling rapid analysis of data. This in turn can result in increased top-line profits and a distinct competitive edge. Kodak Alaris exists to help customers accelerate digital transformation, remove complexity and unlock the power of information.
How does GITEX help you connect with your customers and partners?
It’s not only a great place to connect with customers and partners, but also a great learning ground. Because GITEX focuses on our target industry and brings so many of the key players and users in one place, it represents an ideal opportunity for interaction between all the interested parties. Our discussions at the event help us gain a greater understanding of how Kodak Alaris can help current and future customers with their information management requirements based on a customized approach to the region’s specific needs.
What kind of IT trends do you see impacting the regional ICT industry in the next two years?
Ninety percent of the world’s data has been produced in the last two years. In fact, 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are produced every day. This is equivalent to 10 million blue ray discs stacked on top of each other, equaling the height of four Eiffel Towers. So it’s critical to gain control of how digital information is captured and managed.
Kodak Alaris exists to help customers accelerate digital transformation, remove complexity and unlock the power of information. The world is moving quickly. Those that navigate the challenges of digital transformation with precision and agility will gain valuable insight, get closer to their customers and truly become knowledge-based organizations that deliver on all of their business objectives.
One of the other big challenges for businesses is how to channel information. And I am not referring merely to direct information such as letters, emails and documents that pass directly to and through a business or government agency. I mean unstructured information that, in this Age of Information, and in a hyper-connected world, comes from multiple sources.
We all see the pervasiveness of Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and other social media platforms every day. Information can go viral literally in the blink of an eye! So not only do businesses need to be part of these conversations, but they need to achieve a measure of control over them to remain reputable in a time when one negative comment about a company can snowball and catch a business off guard.
This applies to governments, which need to protect their citizens and maintain national security and healthcare providers that need to improve patient care. These are pressing issues which need solutions. All of this information needs to be gathered and harnessed. There are phenomenal technologies out there and people are pioneering this field like never before. Kodak Alaris is well-positioned to take part and make a major impact on the way people work and manage information in their everyday lives.
