Intelligent CIO Africa Issue 06 | Page 30

TALKING BUSINESS mention the various places that data can be input from or output to, such as mobile, cloud, ECM systems and other repositories as part of the process. This is where Kodak Alaris Information Management (KA-IM) is now playing a leading role: in the digital transformation of its worldwide customer base. It does so by providing the hardware, software and services to reduce the cost and effort needed to rein in the complexity of information management, thereby transforming data into a real competitive advantage. How is the Kodak Alaris brand leveraging the opportunity that big data presents? The ever-increasing flood of data and how we manage it, is one of the greatest opportunities facing businesses and governments in the 21st century. The challenge with big data, other than the obvious fact that it is big, is that so much of it is unstructured. Today, at least 90% of business data – approximately 35 Zettabytes – is unstructured. By 2020, we will be able to fill 8 trillion DVDs with new data each year. The struggle among businesses to extract meaningful information from unstructured data is universal. Data is ubiquitous and is embedded in countless formats. It’s in our email, paper documents, online posts, videos and more. Most of the time it’s free form, in every format except the neatly organised rows and columns of a database. We refer to this as ‘data chaos’ – the point where the size and growth of unstructured data vastly outpaces structured data, presenting significant obstacles to operational efficiency, responsiveness to customers and profitable growth. To raise awareness about the newest ways to combat data chaos, Kodak Alaris has launched a series of high-impact marketing initiatives. First, we carefully crafted a business narrative describing ‘The Era of Data Chaos’ to articulate the challenges and opportunities for organisations 30 INTELLIGENTCIO attempting to make sense of the tsunami of information, which continues to grow exponentially. The systems and strategies designed to manage structured data are insufficient to capitalise on the opportunity presented by unstructured data. The exploitation of unstructured data represents too great an opportunity for businesses to ignore. Business narratives are critical for organisations to create a clear purpose that resonates with what the market needs. For Kodak Alaris’ IM division, that purpose is to provide the science, technology, services and partner ecosystem needed to drive business growth for customers in the era of data chaos. Tell us a bit about your presence in EMEA We have offices in London, Germany, Paris, Netherlands, Dubai and Hungary, to name a few. Also, through our ecosystem – through distributers and partners, we are very well connected all over this region. If you take into account all the services we provide – including maintenance, consultation etc, we definitely have a significant presence in the region. What is the latest and most exciting technology from Kodak Alaris? Technology will continue to evolve and we will strive to ensure that Kodak Alaris is able to provide high-end products aligned with the evolution of technology. These days, for the digitilisation of documents, companies WHAT IS ‘GOOD ENOUGH’ SECURITY REALLY COSTING YOU? need high volume of documents to be scanned. Kodak Alaris provides machines that are capable of managing high volume of documents. This technology is able to not only scan the documents, but also, to extract data. We will continue to invest in that path. There is a growing trend of requiring more and more scanning at the point of origin, where documents enter an organisation (e.g. corporate mailroom, credit card application, insurance claim, resume/employee onboarding) and we will continue to invest in distributed capturing solutions to address this requirement. Truth is, good enough security is just not good enough. You simply can’t focus on just prevention or detection and call it a day. When — not if — a breach happens, who do you want on your side? The experts who are on the front lines of comprehensive detection, analysis and response or the other guys? FireEye. Know the truth. There will be more and more innovation in this area to further improve scanner efficiency – to provide ‘in a box’ solutions. This is also an area where we will continue to invest. We’ve made a commitment to being a ‘cloud-first’ company (not a ‘cloud only’ company) as the trend towards cloud computing is starting to accelerate. We’ve seen a lot of our enterprise customers moving some of their core components of their business, like finance, HR etc to the cloud and we need to constantly shape our offerings as per what the market demands. ¡ www.intelligentcio.com www.FireEye.com/truth www.intelligentcio.com INTELLIGENTCIO 31