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Document Imaging Report June 20, 2022 Page 1 Table Of Contents A Few DIR Programming Notes 2 Is There a Difference Between Capture and IDP? Thoughts from AIIM and Appian Conferences 3 Capture Conference Sneak Peek: Saving IT Time With TWAIN Direct 4 A Conversation With Brother: Document Management and Focusing on Customer Solutions 5 Kyocera Document Solutions America “Reimagines the Future” at National Dealer Event 8 A Murder of Scanners: Meet Raven 10 The DIR Interview: Amanda Holmes, Thoughts on a Career in Channel Marketing 13 Document Imaging Report June 20, 2022 Page 2 A Few DIR Programming Notes As Fathers’ Day draws to a close here in the US, a shout-out to all the dads. Whether you’re a Daddy, Pops, Old Man, Dad, Father, etc., fatherhood is equal parts tough (which reminds me I need a new pro□le photo, I'm a little grayer than this these days!) and rewarding. Hug ‘em tight, no matter how old they are. And same to the Mothers out there, our publication calendar didn’t land on that day, so it wasn’t top of mind. You more often than not have more to juggle than the fathers, Happy (belated) Mothers’ Day. I over-estimated my ability to listen to and make sense of more recorded interview hours than I thought from AIIM. I’ll empty out that notebook for our next issue (or maybe two – I recorded more than I thought I had!). This issue also sees the □rst in what will become an ongoing feature – The DIR Interview. We’ll □nd and interview interesting and informative industry professionals about their career and industry perspectives. Please feel free to suggest interview candidates. Similarly, we have the □rst Capture Conference Sneak Peek interview. Get a glimpse into what you’ll learn in Chicago on September 7&8. Thanks for reading. Bryant Duhon Editor-in-Chief bdu@info-source.com Comments, criticisms, and witticisms welcomed. Document Imaging Report June 20, 2022 Page 3 In April I attended back-to-back conferences in the same week. I □rst □ew down to Fort Lauderdale for Appian World and then out to Denver for AIIM 2022. Appian is a leading vendor of low-code work□ow automation software, while AIIM is the leading trade organization for ECM/content services technology. Capture was featured at both events, except at Appian World, it was referred to as IDP (Intelligent Document Processing). So, what is IDP and how does it differ from Capture? IDP is an acronym that has really risen to common usage in the past three years. It □rst came to prominence primarily as a complement to the fast- growing RPA market (Note: both acronyms include a “P” for process/processing). RPA is great at handling structured processes and input. In many cases, IDP was developed to enable it to ingest unstructured input, which over 90% of the time are documents. IDP vendors have one other major difference with traditional Capture vendors — their technology was developed from the get-go leveraging AI and machine- learning technology. This enables set up and training to be done more ef□ciently, through a learn-by-example approach, which has lowered the barrier to entry into the market. As a result, we’ve seen the number of vendors in the Capture market more than triple in recent years. Appian is one of the IDP vendors, having launched its own Capture platform in 2020, as a complement to its low-code automation stack. Appian originally based its IDP on Google’s Document AI technology and then in 2021, transitioned to its own AI/machine learning-based technology, and offering Google Document AI as an upgrade. Appian had partnerships with Capture vendors in the past but found they could address applications like customer onboarding with their AI-driven platform. Enter AIIM Is There a Difference Between Capture and IDP? Thoughts from AIIM and Appian Conferences For Appian, the acronym IDP makes sense, because they have no repository and there are truly just capturing to a process. And our data shows scan-to-process to be the fastest growing primary reason that people buy Capture. This includes applications like onboarding, claims processing, and accounts payable. That said, records management remains an important piece of the Capture market and is still the primary reason that about a quarter of users buy Capture. This is where AIIM comes in. Information Governance is the term AIIM uses to cover all sorts of compliance and records management reasons that people deploy Capture. And Information Governance is certainly not decreasing in importance. It may be decreasing as the “primary” reason businesses buy Capture, but in many cases, the same data captured for a process can be leveraged for Information Governance, so there is de□nitely some crossover—and it’s only going to increase. Document Imaging Report June 20, 2022 Page 4 Capture Conference Sneak Peek: Saving IT Time With TWAIN Direct At the AIIM Conference, CEO Peggy Winton stressed how Information Governance is more than ever bleeding over into customer engagement. As a result, Capture to Process is converging with Records Management. In addition, the traditional Capture vendors, whose technology was once based on templates and OCR, are all introducing more AI and machine-learning technology into their applications. This enables them to better compete with the IDP start-ups. At the same time, we are seeing the start-ups look at more information governance-type applications as they seek to expand the breadth of their potential markets and move into higher-volume/mission-critical applications. It seems that going forward, if they haven’t already converged, Capture and IDP will be considered the same thing. That said, I’ll make one □nal observation on this topic of terminology used to de□ne the market. Prior to the AIIM and Appian events, I had the opportunity to speak at the Document Strategy Forum Conference in Chicago, where there were probably 30 people in the room for a presentation titled “Taking Capture Past the Edge: How AI and Omni-Channel Input Will Transform the Market.” When I brought up the term “IDP,” nobody seemed to know what it meant. From my discussions, it seems users are more concerned with automation of speci□c processes, whether those are claims, onboarding, accounts payable, or something else. The set of technologies used to accomplish this is somewhat irrelevant. That means it could be AI/Machine Learning, OCR, Capture, IDP, work□ow, etc., or some combination under the hood. The question users want answered is, does it solve their input management challenges? As we’ve discussed, Infosource’s de□nition of an ideal future Capture solution consists of a series of containerized standardized cloud services that use AI-based technologies and advanced classi□cation. These services can be called individually or collectively to drive and integrate with work□ows and business intelligence applications. This ability to provide specialized, as well as end-to-end processing, is a big part of how we judge and will continue to judge the vendors in our annual Capture SW Vendor Matrix. As we here at Infosource continue to get ready for the capture conference, we’ll begin to share “sneak peeks” at what you’ll learn from both our sponsors (like TWAIN, thank you!) and our speakers (look for a conversation with our own Ralph Gammon in the next issue). Ralph Gammon is a Senior Analyst, Software, at Infosource. He has covered the content-services market for more than 20 years, and formerly worked as the editor and publisher of the Document Imaging Report. To inquire about access and/or a subscription to our capture research services, contact Ralph at rg@info-source.com. For a preview of what you'll □nd in the report, read Ralph's blog post introducing the 2022 Capture Vendor Matrix. Document Imaging Report June 20, 2022 Page 5 A Conversation With Brother: Document Management and Focusing on Customer Solutions A reminder, the Capture Conference 2022 will be held on September 7&8 just outside of Chicago. Don’t delay, book today. Find all conference details here. For this issue, we spoke with Kevin Neal, CEO of P3iD and , about the latest developments in TWAIN. Here’s what we spoke about, . And, of course, register to speak to Kevin in person in September! you can watch/listen by clicking here for the link to the video □. What is TWAIN? □. What is the value of TWAIN and TWAIN Direct for scanner and software vendors? □. What is the value of TWAIN and TWAIN Direct for end-users? □. What's the latest from the TWAIN Working Group? □. What's next for TWAIN Direct innovation? □. What is the importance of cybersecurity for TWAIN Direct? □. How does a technology such as TWAIN Direct help expand the market? □. How does someone get involved with the TWAIN Working Group? □. Kevin, what is it about TWAIN that makes you so passionate about this stuff? Somehow, despite covering all of the various incarnations of document imaging since 1995, I’ve never spoken to Brother International Corporation. When they recently refreshed their product lineup met with Infosource Senior Analyst Barbara Richards, I thought it was time to □x that. I had the pleasure of speaking with Bob Burnett, Director of B2B Solutions Deployment and Planning, and Shelly Radler, Senior Product Marketing Manager. While mostly a introductions-type meeting, I also took the opportunity to discuss a few industry trends from Brother’s perspective. Document Imaging Report June 20, 2022 Page 6 The WFH Trend Brother and Document Management Note that in the July 11 issue of DIR, Barbara will provide an overview of her thoughts on the hardware conversation she had with Brother. Burnett kicked things off by explaining what he believes is a market advantage – the □at nature of the organization. Burnett’s group encompasses product planning, solutions architects, plus □eld engineering. This integrated team allows marketing to quickly identify customer needs and helps streamline communications with the engineering teams in Japan. He also mentioned special solution teams who will customize capabilities on a machine. Burnett notes that Brother’s range of products (MPFs, scanners, and printers) allows them to □t a wide range of needs. He continues, “It’s understanding what the customer needs from a document process standpoint. Do they need color laser? Inkjet? Monochrome laser? Do they need a standalone scanner? What are the volumes needed? Then how do you help them manage a print/scanner □eet that’s both in the of□ce and in the work from home environment?” While Brother is currently focused on lower-volumes, Burnett did point out that their newer scanners are faster with a higher duty cycle (60ppm and 9,000 pages). That’s not production scanning, but Brother can serve needs beyond just desktop scanning too. As Burnett put it, “COVID stomped its foot on the accelerator for a lot of things that were happening in the industry.” With the need to immediately WFH, many companies just opened up the gates and effectively said, get whatever you need to work now. That pendulum is swinging back to center, but it’s now a “help desk nightmare.” Before the pandemic, perhaps an IT department was supporting □ve to 10 devices, often from a single manufacturer. “Today,” Burnett said, “it could be 50 different models from 10 manufacturers.” [Note: this is where utilities like TWAIN Direct bring tremendous value to IT departments. , TWAIN Direct board member, regarding TWAIN Direct, and other industry trends, as part of our interview series as we all gear up to attend the Capture Conference in Chicago, Sept 7&8 Click here to watch/listen my interview with Kevin Neal Brother’s focus is on helping organizations standardize document processes and □eet management, wherever the devices are used. With a focus on the right □t, Brother realizes the right □t might be existing equipment from a competitor. The company’s print □eet management software can also include non-Brother devices. The level of detail isn’t as precise, but at least every device can be managed in one place. Much like in our conversation with Raven, Brother also using document management as a core part of their marketing message, rather than intelligent automation, etc. During COVID, Brother took the opportunity to research and speak to decision-makers – IT pros, purchasing managers, etc. They asked them questions about how their □eet is being used during the pandemic and future usage. Document Imaging Report June 20, 2022 Page 7 The result was terminology focused around document management and work□ow, which applies to both printed and digital documents. Another □nding was a growing realization of printed documents being a security risk. The simple act of leaving a document in an output tray is a potential breach. Brother allows companies to control that output, and will help companies printer fewer documents, to help manage a secure document work□ow. This is traditional pull printing technology, which every MFP company I’ve ever spoken to has. Brother looks at security on three pillars with hardware (including scanners): □. Securing the device (which can mean physical access to the device) and access to it from the front panel, □. Rights management – users can have full access or limited access to only some functionality, the ability to fax or only scan to a particular destination. □. The alphabet soup of network protocols to keep cybercriminals from hacking into the device or content in transit (or at rest) It’s a cliché, but a true one, that employees are the weakest point in any security plan. Many don’t understand the implications and importance of leaving a document with customers’ PII for hours on the printer. Brother “preaches” to customers that they should have an education program – both for the device(s) as well as change management so that users understand the importance of security related to their print/scan hardware. This isn’t easy. As Burnett mentioned, after 42 years in the of□ce equipment business, “I've yet to see a customer have exactly the same security, schema, or requirements for their environment. With all of the nuances in the real world, you have to tailor the security package to what that customer wants.” Since too many times, IT staff doesn’t change the admin password on devices, Brother ships every device with a unique admin password, with a scrolling message recommending that admin password should be changed. Administrators can also set the character count on passwords beyond a usual 8-character minimum. From there, it’s up to the individual companies to take advantage of these security prompts. You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink (at least that’s what my reading of security challenges over the last few years leads me to conclude). As we were introducing ourselves, Burnett had mentioned a tight relationship between product design and customer feedback. The example he gave relates to security and burden of administering the devices. Burnett explains, “They can't monitor every single computer and switch and printer that's on their network for any kind of bad activity, so they use system log monitoring tools. Our products couldn’t talk to those tools a few years ago. Since then, we’ve built into our products that our machines can play nice with those applications.” As a selling point, Burnett noted that focusing no ease of administration has helped them win customers, both new business and replacing competitors. “Our tag line is “at your side,” said Burnett, “which is part of the Brother culture. We are helping customers solve problems. I know it sounds like a cliché, but it’s how we want our employees to think and act. Even from a mixed □eet perspective, we help our channel partners and customers look for the best □t. If that large A3 copier from another manufacturer is the best □t in a particular zone, we look to be compatible and supplement in other areas around that device.” Document Imaging Report June 20, 2022 Page 8 Burnett thinks this is a competitive advantage for Brother in the channel (they don’t sell direct), “We're not a competitor, we're not a threat to them, we're not going to take any business away from them. Understanding what the channel needs for support is an equally critical piece of our strategy as understanding the end user customer needs.” Kyocera Document Solutions America “Reimagines the Future” at National Dealer Event To achieve these value propositions the company □rst had to make some amends for the past year with regards to product backorders and chip shortages. It was refreshing to see an executive team offer their channel partners an opportunity to address these concerns unscripted. This showed real strength and promise to their dealer network. The show provided the dealer attendees an opportunity to learn about new hardware and software solutions in the technology fair and several educational tracks ranging from adopting an e-commerce solution to the subscription economy along with cloud services. I’ll turn the end of this over to Burnett on his □nal thoughts on Brother’s market approach, “Our overarching message goes back to our campaign of how work now works and that Brother is ready to help our customers achieve their goals with our broad spectrum of products. We also think we have a competitive differentiator from a support standpoint to help our customers improve their businesses, improve their work□ows, keep things secure and take their businesses to the next level.” Earlier this month I had attended Kyocera Document Solutions America’s Dealer Event in San Antonio, TX. It was one of the □rst large dealer events for the of□ce equipment industry since before the pandemic. I can say the dealers, vendors, and analysts were all happy to be back working together after such a long a break. Roughly 225 dealers were in attendance, covering both the U.S. and Latin America regions as well as representation from Kyocera corporate headquarters in Japan. During the event Kyocera highlighted the theme “Reimagine” and revealed the company’s vision and plan for future growth. At the keynote, Natalie Cumberbatch, Vice President of Human Resources, explained that “reimagine is about not accepting what we have. It’s about wanting to make it better, wanting to .” build a brighter future During the general session, Kyocera’s President and CEO Oscan Sanchez highlighted the company’s objectives moving forward and offered several value propositions to their dealers: □. Become the easiest company to do business with tied to operational excellence □. Continuing to innovate their hardware portfolio with strong A3 and A4 products □. Offer new revenue stream with production inkjet printers □. Develop and promote their new software solutions leveraging the Databank relationship. Document Imaging Report June 20, 2022 Page 9 Kyocera announced two new A4 models: PA 2000W printer starting at an SRP $248 MA 2000W MFP (print/copy & windows scan) with an SRP of $324 Both models offer print speeds of 21ppm, built-in wireless, and a lightweight, compact design. According to Kyocera these new models are designed to strengthen their A4 line up and are targeted at the growing SOHO hybrid of□ce market. In addition, Kyocera plans to announce 22 new devices in the coming year. Early this year Kyocera launched their cloud print and scan management system and Infosource had an opportunity to see a live demo in the technology fair at the event. Designed to help hybrid workers print from anywhere and easily scan to the cloud or a 3 -party document storage system. Documents can be scanned directly to the cloud, eliminating additional capital expenses and IT managers can bene□t with fewer in- house print servers to deal with. rd The pandemic has accelerated the demand for cloud solutions. This product provides their dealer channel an ideal stepping-stone to cloud services and a recurring revenue stream. In addition to the cloud print and scan solution, Kyocera also highlighted several document management solutions in the fair such as their capture manager and net manager solutions. The company also highlighted their Databank relationship, which Kyocera acquired in 2017. Moving forward, the goal for their channel partners is to offer Databank’s ECM content services through their professional services side of the business. Overall, the event was well received, having been the □rst out of the gate there was much enthusiasm in the air. Kyocera did a □ne job of outlining the company vision and reimaging the future for their customers. Barbara Richards has 20+ years’ experience within the of□ce technology market in the areas of product development, market research, and competitive analysis. She is the Senior Hardware Analyst at Infosource, a market intelligence □rm with over 30 years of experience in the of□ce automation industry. Ms. Richards is responsible for document management scanners and MFP market at Infosource. Reach her at br@info-source.com. Document Imaging Report June 20, 2022 Page 10 Marketing With Document Management The goal is to have users be able to use the scanner as they want. With many sales through Amazon, they have a large customer base without any IT support. Diasti thinks Raven’s ability to be used as a standalone scanner or to connect to the cloud whenever a user becomes comfortable with doing so makes their devices a □t for both the consumer and the business worlds. The company also has Raven Cloud, which delivers functionality similar to Box or Google Docs, a lightweight document management cloud system. When asked how core to their strategy the software is, I was a bit surprised at how focused they are on the software. Diasti continued, “We have some pretty unique feature sets that we’ve heard our customers say they want and need. For instance, the need to edit PDFs after scanning, but they don’t have Adobe. We pull a full PDF editor with annotation, form builders, redaction, etc. They can use their preferred cloud storage, but many customers choose to use the Raven Cloud as a cloud document solution. It’s a point of differentiation for us as well as in line with our mission of simplicity, to help customers have tools they need out of the box to digitize documents.” Because we did a scheduling dance because of his visit to Taiwan, we □rst began by talking about manufacturing (he was visiting Taiwan after 2 and half years of not being able to due to the pandemic to visit manufacturing sites and plan for international expansion) if Raven is a white label for another brand or own their own manufacturing. The software is developed by Raven. The hardware is manufactured with partners, “in terms of IP and actual manufacturing.” Speaking about the software, he said, “all of the software – the Web-based application, scanner interface, mobile application, etc. – is 100% in-house. The majority of my team are software engineers.” I was drawn to their prominent usage of document management on their website and in their marketing messages. It’s a different, dead simple marketing message that differs from most of the others in the space (though the ultimate goal is the same, ingest documents and make them accessible as quickly and simply as possible for business usage). Why have they taken this messaging approach to the market? Diasti, “It’s where we saw a need in the market. Also, as a company with 100% cloud infrastructure, we have employees who aren’t software engineers, HR for one, who don’t know anything about a scanner driver. We saw a need internally to make it easy as possible to connect scanning to the cloud. We wanted to make a product that was simple – simple to understand pre-purchase and simple to use post-purchase.” One of the best things about this industry is the continued evolution and meeting new(er) companies. We noticed Raven, a scanner manufacturer, a few months ago. We got in touch with Stefan Diasti, CEO, for a conversation about the industry, their marketing approach, and the continued importance and growth of the capture industry. A Murder of Scanners: Meet Raven Document Imaging Report June 20, 2022 Page 11 The sweet spot is as expected with the scanners’ speed and footprint – small to medium business and departments within larger companies and the individual/home of□ce market (expected with a large Amazon presence). He noted rapid growth in large enterprise settings, and they are slowly tweaking the product roadmap to support those clients. He notes they “don’t want to go down that road too quickly because we want to make sure that we maintain that focus on usability. That interface design that customers have come to love us for. And so it's a delicate balance their right as we kind of take on some of these capabilities and functionality that larger Enterprises want to have on the product without disrupting the essence of what's made us successful.” As they investigate moving up-market, they will be looking at partnerships with the various software vendors we’re all familiar with. At the moment, the focus is on exploring how to make that move without losing their focus. I mentioned Raven in the April 25, 2022, issue of DIR for their user-friendliness by noting the size of the touchscreen on the device – it’s huge. Even if functionality of the smaller screens on other scanners in the market is the same, the large size screams simplicity and user friendliness to me. Diasti noted he’s been asked repeatedly about decreasing the size of the screen to cut costs, but he thinks that would also reduce their value. He explains, “In the beginning with the just the original and pro models, my intention was to focus on true stand- alone design. The idea was that you would need a computer to set it up, but not to use it. As a stand-alone device, the idea was you could place it anywhere with an Internet connection. To really do that and make it practical, you need a larger screen – we don’t want to make people hunt and squint on the interface. It was 100% intentional and we’ve only increased the screen size over time. It’s part of the brand at this point and I think it makes a tremendous difference in terms of usability He thinks user friendliness also gave them an edge over competitors like Brother and Fujitsu [Note: both brands also have user-friendly features.] He pointed out that the initial products didn’t have a heavy reliance on drivers to keep working, so Windows and Mac upgrades weren’t constantly driving customers nuts with broken drivers. I do think they’re going to lose this edge soon, if not already (especially if tools like TWAIN Direct become widely adopted), but it did allow them to grab market share in the early days of the company. I don’t think I currently agree with him here – though the screen size has me on the fence – that devices are unique in that they were built with the cloud in mind and not ever have to interact with a computer. What I do think is unique [readers, correct me if I’m wrong], “we continue to add new cloud services via over-the-air update to our devices. So whether someone became a customer two years ago or two weeks ago, they’re getting new capabilities on that existing hardware without having to go buy something new on an ongoing basis. The same is true for Raven Cloud, of course.” Document Imaging Report June 20, 2022 Page 12 Raven talks to customers daily and their roadmap is 100% driven based on those conversations (and Amazon reviews). The company has full-time employees whose job is to talk to customers and understand how they use the product – what do they want? Diasti said they’ve literally received letters – in the mail – from customers thanking them for listening to and implementing improvements based on their feedback. A recent (roughly year ago) redesign of the user interface was based on customer feedback. From the beginning, there were 4 buttons on the screen to start. Raven found that customers were having to go back and forth to search for destinations – that’s now on the home screen. They’ve added common features like the ability to create groups – the scan button remained in the same place though. He noted in the past, usually when you do that kind of major change, you get a good bit of blowback. He was only able to remember a handful of customers calling to complain about the new interface once it rolled out. As Diasti said, “I was shocked.” Other recent updates have been fairly simply, adding new destinations like Cleo for legal clients, QuickBooks Online, and they’re in the process of adding Amazon S3. One other point of uniqueness, in addition this marriage of cloud-based subscription provisioning of updates to a scanner platform, is that they only have a single model. So, as he said whether it’s “Grandma wanting to be able to scan her recipes (or, more seriously, estate planning documents) without having to ask the grandkids for help or a Fortune 500 company that wants to deploy across store locations, it’s the same software and ease of setup.” Where that matters is especially in the consumer or WFH market. If the network con□guration is dif□cult, it’s going to be a call to IT for help, and we all know how much IT loves support calls for hardware. Raven decided to design a product to work in both the consumer and enterprise worlds. Diasti acknowledged that, at some point, they might have to add complexity to the product to penetrate the enterprise market, but, as mentioned above, they’re moving slowly and still intend to focus on the user experience. He thinks their hardware is ready. The Pro scans 60 pages and has a 100 sheet ADF (though they’ll probably need to increase the size of the ADF). The Promax has a □atbed attached. As we began to wrap up, I returned to the emphasis on document management and if it resonates with users – and will it resonate in the enterprise market when compared to intelligent capture, intelligent document processing, etc. His response, “We’re going to lean into this basic document management message. I began my career in a Fortune 100 environment and know that environment and how products are positioned. You described messaging confusion with different terminology. If your market is the corporate market, I think that’s □ne. We want to be more wide-ranging and intuitive, in line with our brand overall. I mean, people are scanning a stack of paper – a stack of documents. We have a document scanner – that’s literally what it is. In the user testing we’ve done, that language resonates because that’s what they need, that’s what they’re searching for, that’s the problem they have.” The customer doesn’t need to know the complexity involved in scanning a document. They just want to solve the problem in front of them today. Customer-Driven Innovation Document Imaging Report June 20, 2022 Page 13 The DIR Interview: Amanda Holmes, Thoughts on a Career in Channel Marketing She has over 20 years of experiences in the B2B marketing world particularly focused in the Technology and IT sectors, ranging both from agency and consultancy work to client-side marketing. Most noticeably, she has focused 100% on working with vendors who operate an indirect model and value the importance of working with and through channel communities. Go Ravens Growth and Size As a private company, they don’t have any public numbers available. He did say they are increasing in “terms of size and market share to the tune of 15% to 20% month-over- month. He sees growth and demand both rising. They currently sell in the US and Canada, but will start to sell into Europe, beginning with the UK and Germany (they already ship a surprising number of units there from the US Amazon site). They move a lot of product through Amazon (I tried a combo of searches, and they were generally □rst or second mixed in with some combination of Epson, Brother, and Fujitsu). While “Daddy Bezos” does a good job of allowing a company like Raven to gain traction and market share – especially those with a sound digital marketing plan, Raven will be expanding and developing relationships with existing and new channel partners. Since I sit less than a mile from the home of the Ravens here in Baltimore, I asked about the name and why not a more Texas-related name, like, say “longhorn” or “armadillo” (the of□cial roadkill of Texas, by the way). Beyond that it’s short and memorable and they were able to get the domain name, it also □t into the brand they were trying to build. Diasti said they liked the idea of a Raven □ying documents into the cloud and thought it was “kind of cool.” Though they did make the logo friendlier than Ravens are in real life [they will recognize people who have antagonized them and attack them. ]. Moral of the story: don’t be mean to ravens [Editor’s Note: This is the □rst in what I hope will be an ongoing series of interviews with innovative, interesting, and/or in□uencers industry professionals. Do you know of anyone who might be □ying under the radar that deserves wider recognition? Someone you’d like to see interviewed? Let me know: .] bduhon@info-source.com Amanda Holmes is a Marketing Director for Kodak Alaris and is responsible for building Go To Market and Channel strategies across the APAC and EMEA regions. She works to develop partner programs, shaping them through partner and end user demand generation activities and developing relationships with key partners to grow and transform the business. Document Imaging Report June 20, 2022 Page 14 In 2002, Amanda’s career started at Intel, where she held several positions, □rstly as a Channel Marketing Manager helping to execute the country strategies across UK, Benelux, and the Nordics. She then expanded her responsibilities to develop core campaigns to the reseller community. Amanda’s experience spans from leading marketing departments and running effective and innovative campaigns, to setting the strategy and planning activities to drive further growth into the sales pipeline. Outside of work, Amanda is an avid Cross □tter, training six days a week and resides in Oxford with her three teenage sons and partner – outnumbered 4 to 1! DIR: Congratulations for being named to CRN’s 2022 Women of the Channel List. On a personal level, how ful□lling is it to be recognized? Yeah. It is funny when you tell people and you feel a little bit bashful and shy, but I’m not a bashful or shy person. It’s rewarding, though you do get some skeptical people, “Did you pay for that?” AH: There was an application process to provide details about my career and it is nice to be recognized. It just gives you a sense of, OK, now on I'm doing well, I'm doing all right. [For the record, no payment is involved in the award. .] See the complete CRN 2022 list here DIR: I know this is a very broad question but how is marketing for the channel different today versus when you started? This being your third position in channel marketing [Ed note: Intel and Polycom]? AH: I suppose many of the changes are the same as elsewhere – everything has gotten more demanding and gone more online. We’re having to change our techniques faster than before. But I don’t think channel marketing, or our approach to the channel, has changed. For me, the biggest change has been having to work harder to get more market share with partners from the vendor side. When I was with Intel, Intel had something like 90% market share. The focus was on □ne-tuning aspects of the partner program – everyone knows who Intel is, right? Polycom was similar, though there were more competitors. Now at Kodak Alaris, we have to really work to get that market share with the partners. We have to prove ourselves because they have so many other vendors that they're working with. Document Imaging Report June 20, 2022 Page 15 It's a noisy market, so we really have to make sure that we add value and we can demonstrate that value and we can demonstrate that they can grow and increase their share of wallet. I think those demands just got greater. We’re often a smaller piece of a partner’s overall pie, so we have to go that extra mile to standout. DIR: Is there a huge difference in marketing to the channel versus marketing directly to an end customer? AH: It is marketing. We’re either marketing through ourselves to the end customer or marketing with and through our partners out to end customers. In the end, it’s about awareness – people need to understand who we are. It’s more about showing relevance and having the right message that provides value to the end customer. With direct marketing, you’re generally working with Sales and then to the end customer. The channel adds another step. The message isn’t greatly different, you just have to pay attention to the subtleties. DIR: What was the most fun, creative, or satisfying campaign you’ve ever worked on – either with Kodak Alaris or elsewhere? AH: What we’re doing at the moment is quite fun. So, we've got our friend Max here. Our newest addition to our low-volume portfolio is the S3000 Max Series. We’re having a bit of fun and it's just nice that we can have a little bit of a play in marketing. We’ve created this character and now we've started a “Maximise” campaign. There have been many others as well, but one that sticks out is from my time at Intel. We developed and created an online learning platform for our partners. I can’t remember the exact product, but it was for a speci□c Business to Business product that we were launching through the channel. I remember just having a lot of fun, being in a studio recording, creating the online training, and providing that platform. What I love is actually the ability to try new things and then bringing them to market. I've been very blessed at Kodak Alaris to have the autonomy to trial and error some things. Not everything is going to work, but having that attitude of let’s try it, pilot it, learn, and adjust as needed. I know coming out of Covid, we're all feeling the desire to have a bit more fun. With Max, we just wanted to add a human element and bring it to life a little. DIR: Is there anything different or unique about the challenges of this channel? AH: I suppose what I said before – the share of voice. The market is also in a transformative time with paper declining. We have to □nd different routes to market – working with existing partners to add additional scanners, could be working with system integrators, and could be working with ISVs to integrate into their solutions. Document Imaging Report June 20, 2022 Page 16 Pivoting into the solutions world is a big change. As digital transformation accelerated, it’s trying to navigate where we best □t. First, how we best □t as a hardware company (with software). Second, companies are trying to navigate the hybrid work environment and what pieces of technology □t where. DIR: It’s fading, but I still get mental whiplash when scanner companies talk about solutions. Talk to us about the ongoing importance of the Channel for you. AH: We are still a Channel-□rst organization. It enables us to scale. Roughly half of our revenues come from countries in which we have no legal entities. We’re currently working to streamline our administration so we can go to market more effectively and ef□ciently. In those markets where we don’t have a legal entity, it’s a classic go-to- market model of working with distributors. They’re sort of our warehouse logistics arm and then they're working with and through the resellers to get to the end customer. So in those countries, the Channel is everything to us. They’re our brand – us, in a way. In countries where we have legal entities, the focus is on working with those specialized channels to help us get deep into the enterprise and get closer to the customer. In the countries where we have no Kodak Alaris legal presence, the approach is still getting into those verticals, but we then need a solid relationship with a distributor and then we need to build out the breadth of Partners in those countries to take that message to Market. So, it's about scale, but it's also about a focused approach into the right verticals. DIR: What marketing messages and themes are resonating today, both with your customers as well as the channel? Just curious if there’s any difference on the reception to your messaging. AH: The messages are the same, but there’s a subtle difference. The main message is, of course, to help customers automate processes and deliver positive business outcomes. Now, you can spin that very easily to a partner community because it helps with increasing the share of wallet. We know that digital transformation has accelerated so, we've got to focus on better speed (in accessing and retrieving information) which equals more pro□tability. With our partners, our goal is to arm and enable them with messaging and product to help them increase their share of wallet. DIR: So in some ways, it’s still the basic value of removing paper so you can put documents into business processes to get work done faster? AH: Also messaging to say that it’s not just about paper, you also have documents in digital form. We have a heritage of focusing on quality and innovation, so moving to a message more about scanning and understanding we could have paper, we could have a digital form, we don't care. DIR: As you were answering, it struck me that a background trend across all technology is not only simplicity of use, but simplicity of management (the INfuse Connected Scanner is both) Is that part of your marketing message for the channel to take to IT departments? Document Imaging Report June 20, 2022 Page 17 AH: Yes, that simpli□cation message is one we share with our partners. Especially for the INfuse product – it’s plug and play, and no training is required, so it integrates well with partner solutions. Security is another key message, especially with INfuse, which is one of the most secure solutions for network scanning on the market. Network scanning is also an important message for both partners and in our general marketing. It’s a key conversation for us to continue to have with partners, especially with the simplicity angle for both implementation for partners and use for the end customer. DIR: I know this is a hopelessly broad question, but if you could change one thing about marketing what would that be? AH: At the moment, if you know marketing, the slides at a conference □ve years ago around Martech would have had one or two things on them. Now it feels like there are billions of different opportunities for us in terms of how we can really move things forward using technology and it's really confusing. I'd love to try and simplify and make it easier for us to navigate and understand things that could work for us. It's great to have all these choices, but it does make it very complex for us – what should we use or not use? DIR: That’s right, the choices are great, but there are so many! Looping back to women and IT, have opportunities for women improved over the course of your career? Being in marketing isn’t exactly the same as being an IT professional, but you have held roles in IT-centric companies. AH: It has de□nitely progressed, but I remember when I left Intel that I had well and truly hit that glass ceiling. I knew that I couldn't go anywhere else there. But as I look at Kodak Alaris, we have women in executive positions throughout the company. That’s very much part of our DNA. But I think the fact is that we still talk about diversity and having “women’s days”, etc. It saddens me because it still means that there's a differentiation and it’s still harder for us to climb that ladder. I think if you’re determined, whoever you are, it shouldn’t matter. We’re still talking about diversity and while it has progressed, we aren’t near where it needs to be. You have to have grit and determination. DIR: Have you found you had more professional movement within the IT industry because your career is marketing? AH: I’ve only ever done marketing. I’ve worked in an agency, a consultancy, in corporate marketing at an enterprise level, and IT marketing to vendors. I made the decision to stay within technology and marketing because I love it and because there’s growth and opportunity. I think women in marketing get more respect than they sometimes do in other □elds. I also like the fast pace of technology – the constant change and trying to innovate. My 20-plus year ongoing journey has had some bumps on the way. I’ve had breaks for kids for example, but I feel marketing has maybe the □exibility and the understanding because it is more women orientated. I also think we really need more diversity within the marketing sector as well. I think sales typically is more male-oriented versus marketing, which is more female-oriented. I'd like to see more diversity in both camps. I mean, we have three or four men in our marketing departments, which, yikes, it's a lack of diversity! Document Imaging Report June 20, 2022 Page 18 DIR: Let’s wrap with an open-ended question for you, what’s next? AH: For us, it’s focus and scaling. Focus on the enterprise and getting closer to our customers and focusing in on our partners to provide them the right value. We also have to protect our core business while expanding it. In the same breath, we also have to turn our heads and look to the future. What are the trends and how to move with them? We have our scanner bubble and our software bubble, and we need to subtly move those to meet the ongoing shifts in the world and keep our momentum going. So, protect and grow our core business, while looking at new markets, new growth, and how to develop that through our partners. DOCUMENT IMAGING REPORT Business Trends on Converting Paper Processes to Electronic Format DIR is the leading executive report on managing documents for e-business. Areas we cover include: DIR brings you the inside story behind the deals and decisions that affect your business. 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