Managed.IT - issue 53

18 MANAGED.IT 01732 759725 SCANNERS At the beginning of April, Managed IT joined Alaris and 125 of its partners at the EMEA Alaris Partner Summit 2019 in Warsaw, Poland. There, James Goulding caught up with Alaris President & General Manager Don Lofstrom, who reflected on a better than expected 2018 and outlined his plans to drive further growth by riding on the coat-tails of emerging technologies like AI and machine learning distributed capture – a key growth area in which Alaris has nothing like the market share it enjoys in production capture. That it also supports the company’s strategy to develop an eco-system of hardware and software, wrapped around with solutions, which Alaris and its partners can use to develop specific vertical applications, is another benefit. Alaris introduced its SOC architecture last year in the S2000 series of distributed image capture and scanning devices. This puts a lot more power into a device, so that it is no longer dependent on a connected PC. In this way, it supports today’s more mobile working culture, the trend for scanning at the edge and more cost-effective deployments, a key requirement in emerging markets. At the EMEA Alaris Partner Summit 2019, Alaris was showing the next stage in the development of this platform, which it intends to deploy more widely in its portfolio, including in its production scanners as they are refreshed. Although the new product dominated the partner presentations and took centre stage in the accompanying product showcase, Alaris is initially offering it to a limited number of partners and is anxious not to release too many details (including its name). We will be writing more on it later in the year, but for the time being Lofstrom was willing to talk about it in general terms. In fact, it was the thing he wanted to talk about most; there is clearly a lot of excitement about this product throughout the company. “The S2000 has been in the marketplace for about a year and we are now in the early stages of developing and launching cloud- connected, scan-to-business- process scanning solutions on top There are many ways to start an interview. A good opening gambit is to ask a company about last year’s performance. It lets the interviewer and interviewee ease themselves into a discussion, it provides context, it highlights topics to return to, it suggests a possible framework for the interview to come. The question’s neutrality provides scope to put a positive spin on events, no matter what sort of year the company has just had. In fact, Alaris had a good 2018, so there was much for Alaris President & General Manager Don Lofstrom to look back on positively. But he only wanted to talk about the future, about how the company was elevating the scanner value proposition and about how the excellent scan quality achieved by Alaris hardware and software – an important selling point that can be overlooked – had achieved new relevance in an era of robotic process automation (RPA) and AI. Most of all, he wanted to talk about how Alaris’s system on a chip (SOC) architecture was opening up new possibilities for the company and enabling it to strengthen its offering in of that platform. The new product is not just a purpose-built scanning device; it’s a unique and different type of solution to what has existed in the marketplace before,” he said. Through a combination of SOC architecture, cloud connectivity, bi-directional communications and automatic set-up, the device brings new capabilities to distributed capture ‘at the edge’, which Alaris will build on by working with partners to develop bespoke applications and business workflows. “These elements are ideal for fleets of devices set up at many different locations, as someone who is not an IT professional can take the scanner out of the box, scan in a QR code delivered by the partner, from which the device will automatically find the network and within seconds populate workflows into the device. In the case of scanning invoices, the user just has to push a button and the scanner will push the invoice right into a business process, with bi- directional connectivity to do quality control checks and signalling back to the device if there are errors or issues that need to be resolved,” he said. Market opportunity Preliminary Alaris analysis indicates that this new product could increase the size of the company’s existing addressable market for hardware by as much as 10%. Lofstrom thinks the figure could be even higher. “One of the use cases we see is in retail, where chains of supermarkets get fresh produce deliveries from local suppliers. These tend to be invoiced locally, packed up and sent via FedEx into central processing. For two weeks, the supermarket doesn’t even know it has received the product. You A platform for growth The S2000 has been in the marketplace for about a year and we are now in the early stages of developing and launching cloud- connected, scan-to- business- process scanning solutions Don Lofstrom