Print.IT Reseller - issue 84

01732 759725 34 PARTNER SUMMIT Don Lofstrom Kodak Alaris hosted more than 200 partners from 43 countries at its 2021 virtual Partner Summit for the Europe, Africa, India and Middle East (EMEIA) region. The event’s overarching theme was ‘Growth Starts Here’ Growth starts with Kodak Alaris to be onboarded directly into a business process. “The INfuse platform provides significant opportunities to automate workflows by seamlessly connecting document capture to existing business systems and the cloud. It supports Amazon, Alibaba and Microsoft Azure cloud environments, and we have also added Windows Server 2019 support,” he explained. Software and solutions The software and solutions space is another key focus area for the business, Lofstrom shared details of planned new developments for the Kodak Info Input web-based mobile capture solution, including advanced classification features; along with plans to enhance its teams’ solutions capabilities, as well as forming and building new partnerships to drive incremental growth. Kodak Alaris has also been steadily expanding its connectivity into partner solutions. “We’ve enhanced authentication features and we'll expand that further in the coming year, we have also made significant developments in terms of fleet management with our Scanner Manager tool – a smart, cloud-based device management dashboard designed to optimise scanner operations and manage devices’ lifecycle and the MPS Capture Agent, which enables scanners from Kodak Alaris to be seamlessly integrated into managed print service contracts for optimised digital capture, smarter reporting and management,” Lofstrom said. “By leveraging these capabilities, partners will be able to optimise customers’ document capture infrastructures as easily as printer fleets, achieve visibility over all imaging costs, reduce the cost to serve and expand their business opportunities,” he added. The company is also eyeing up growth within the low volume production capture scanning market. “The Kodak S3000 Series features the advanced paper handling and image processing capabilities, that’s synonymous with scanners from Kodak Alaris, but the key differentiator is the system on a chip architecture built into the device, which puts much more processing power into the scanner itself,” Lofstrom explained. “The scanners offer enhanced connectivity features, the ability to scan directly into apps, an intuitive user interface including touchscreen capability, and enterprise security features all packaged within a small footprint for an A3 class scanner.” Partner awards The event also shone a light on the excellence, growth and engagement of its top partners across the EMEIA region. The annual Partner of the Year awards celebrate partners who have demonstrated excellent growth, engagement, innovation and implementation of customer-centric solutions based on Kodak Alaris’ technology and services portfolio. The winners were chosen based on their commitment to customers, investment in solutions from Kodak Alaris, year on year revenue and growth trajectory, as well as successful joint wins over the past year. Ten partners received awards including two UK-based partners – Midwich was named Top Value Added Distributor, in recognition of its strong performance across all four quarters, excellence in terms of stock holding and product range, and initiatives such as work from home bundles and NHS pricing. Restore received the Top Performing Partner accolade. The company recorded strong overall performance and celebrated a number of key wins including an NHS hospital trust and large government agency. www.alarisworld.com The annual Partner Summit, which was opened by Kodak Alaris President & General Manager, Don Lofstrom, is a clear demonstration of the company’s commitment to its channel partners as the primary vehicle for delivering information management solutions that simplify and improve the way its customers work. Lofstrom provided a recap of the business’ healthy performance in a year that presented unprecedented challenges. “We have continued to perform strongly in a number of vertical markets such as logistics, finance, government, healthcare and BPOs, and we expect that to be the case in the coming year as the marketplace recovers. By 2022, we expect to be at or near what our predictions for the long-term would have been before COVID,” he said. One of the key takeaways in Lofstrom’s address was the company’s commitment to continue to invest for growth. Plans to further expand its market reach include bringing to market new versions of its award-winning production capture and distributed capture scanners and software solutions; continued innovation within the cloud-based connected software and solutions space; forming and building new partnerships; and enhancing the company’s skills in software solutions and professional services to support these initiatives. Smart connected scanning Last year Kodak Alaris won the PrintIT Award for its INfuse Smart Connected Scanning Solution. “INfuse is one of our key investment areas for growth, and one that takes us away from PC-centric solutions into cloud-based connected solutions that have greater intelligence bundled within the solution, leveraging partner technology,” Lofstrom said. INfuse combines software and scanners from Kodak Alaris with a partner’s application to enable content The event shone a light on the excellence, growth and engagement of its top partners across the EMEIA region