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It gets chilly in Rochester in October. But when I arrived for Kodak Alaris Analyst Day, it seemed like things at 336 Initiative Drive were heating up. With new owners and fresh faces in the office, the company rebounded from a lukewarm FY2023 by adding 25 new partners and 100+ new customers globally, amounting to 137% year-over-year (YoY) revenue growth in its solutions businesses. Between that and the integration of generative artificial intelligence (AI) into Info Input Solution 7.1, I didn’t even need a jacket.
New Faces, Same Strategy
This year has been eventful for the scanner and intelligence document processing (IDP) company. Over the past year, Kodak Alaris has been on a hiring spree—acquiring a stable of sales, solution architecture, and professional services talent with experience in the IDP space. Then, in August, the LA-based PE firm Kingswood Capital Management acquired Kodak Alaris from the United Kingdom Pension Fund (UKPF).
But despite the fresh faces and new ownership, the folks at Kodak Alaris didn’t give us any good reason to expect some sort of radical transformation or deviation from the course. During her opening remarks, Vice President of Kodak Alaris Global Marketing Sue Rodeman said that “who we are as a business has not changed.” The company is still committed to its main goals of solidifying its core businesses and driving growth through the IDP space. The new ownership group and fresh talent will help Kodak Alaris, as Rodeman said, “take the business in some directions that we haven't been able to before.”
Strengthening the Channel
As a company that goes to market primarily through a network of channel partners, strengthening these relationships is vital. Kodak Alaris’s strategy involves engaging software-centric resellers that it might not have played with in the past, as well as deepening engagements with existing partners by providing more comprehensive support and training.
Kodak Alaris’s partner programs and training initiatives have been designed to strengthen collaboration with resellers and integrators, ensuring these partners are equipped to effectively represent and implement the company’s IDP solutions. Central to these initiatives is the newly established certification program, which addresses the need for structured training to help partners transition from selling hardware solutions to offering sophisticated software solutions. The program includes sales and technical certifications that empower partners with product knowledge and technical competencies, enabling them to address client needs confidently.
Additionally, Kodak Alaris has offered a ten-part webinar series over the past year. This series has been essential in preparing partners to articulate the value of IDP solutions, covering complex aspects of implementation and the differences between hardware and software sales. Given how selling software for advanced document processing is more nuanced than hardware sales, making such a transition requires a significant investment in training. As a result of its efforts, the company has seen a boost in partner engagement and deal volume as it highlighted several successful deployments during their presentation to analysts.
| Bill Galusha (left), Peter Klentos (middle), and Jeff Munn gave a demo of Info Input Solution during Kodak Alaris Analyst Day. |
Expanding Info Input’s Open Intelligence Paradigm
Kodak Alaris Info Input is an IDP platform that can enable organizations to automate document-centric processes. When we evaluated Kodak Alaris Info Input V6, we were impressed with its “Open Intelligence” paradigm that underpins the solutions end-to-end document workflow automation capabilities.
Kodak Alaris’s Open Intelligence is a strategic approach within Info Input, designed to integrate with top-tier artificial intelligence (AI) models and tools from leading tech providers like Microsoft, Google, and Amazon. The Open Intelligence model leverages the flexibility of these advanced AI services to provide customizable document processing workflows that can adapt to various document types—structured, unstructured, and semi-structured documents with handwritten and machine printed text—without requiring intensive training periods. By maintaining an open architecture, the Open Intelligence design allows Kodak Alaris clients to seamlessly switch or integrate multiple AI providers depending on their unique needs.
In Version 6, Open Intelligence supported AI services that could be used for optical character recognition/intelligent character recognition (OCR/ICR), document classification, data extraction, and data redaction capabilities. Basically, it could classify a document based on its contents then take actions accordingly (for example, extracting invoice data, checking it against a database, and alerting a human if the invoice doesn’t have a matching PO).
In the latest release, Open Intelligence is expanded to support generative AI functionality from Azure OpenAI, Amazon Textract, and custom LLMs. More specifically, the solution supports summarization, complex question-and-answer interactions, and contextual analysis within documents—improving the extraction of complex data fields and summarizing long documents like contracts. This functionality is intended to reduce manual workload, simplify workflow development, and accelerate document comprehension in workflows.
Keypoint Intelligence Opinion
On the drive home from Rochester, there was a lot of time to reflect and ponder the event—the new ownership, the new faces, the new strategies, and the new technology.
I spent a lot of time thinking about the new ownership, and what it can mean for Kodak Alaris. It was unlikely that the risk-averse UKPF—whose purpose is to generate steady returns for pensioners—would make the necessary investments to grow the company. But, with Kingswood at the helm, the focus shifts to maximizing returns—which could mean additional capital for R&D, acquisitions, expanding sales and marketing efforts, as well as cultivating strategic partnerships. Of course, PE firms often operate with a sharper focus on efficiency and revenue generation. It’s possible that Kingswood may evaluate and pivot away from less profitable segments of its portfolio and reinvesting those resources into high-growth areas, such as the IDP solutions leveraging generative AI.
We are already starting to see signals of what Kingswood might do. You’ll notice that I didn’t spend a lot of time discussing scanners. That’s because Kodak Alaris didn’t have many updates to share. Aside from some future device refreshes, Kodak Alaris didn’t mention any big plans to release new hardware. The apparent slowdown in the release cycle is a wise move. If you look at Kodak Alaris’ lineup of scanners, then you’ll notice that it checks just about every box that customers need. There isn’t much that the engineering team can do on the drawing board that will make these devices more competitive. However, there is a lot of work that needs to be done on the IDP side of the equation: a race that has no clear winner yet.
I don’t want you to get the idea that I think Kodak Alaris is going to lose market share or bow out of the scanner space. In fact, I expect the opposite. As Kodak Alaris increases its presence in the channel and focuses more on IDP sales, hardware sales will follow. One thing we’ve learned from resellers and systems integrators is that solutions sales typically generate multi-unit hardware sales. One dealer said they place as many as 10 scanners when deploying their flagship document management solution. As Kodak Alaris makes more IDP sales, it should also enjoy high attachment rates with its scanners, and thus growth in the market.
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