Intelligent CIO Middle East Issue 20 | Page 30

TALKING BUSINESS 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? Gregoire de Clercq, EAMER, Marketing Director, Kodak Alaris Information Management 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 “We’ve made a commitment to being a ‘Cloud-First’ company” 30 INTELLIGENTCIO 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 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 the 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, Hungary etc. Also, through our ecosystem - through 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 digitalisation of documents, companies need a high volume of them to be scanned. Kodak Alaris provides machines that are capable of managing a 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 claims, resume/employee onboarding) and we will continue to invest in distributed capturing solutions to address this requirement. 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