01732 759725 24 One-to-one with Hemel Thakrar In this interview with Michelle Ryder, Hemel Thakrar, Pre-Sales Manager at Kodak Alaris explores some of the standout features of the new KODAK S5000 Series Scanners. He also explains how partners can tap into Kodak Alaris’ professional services and field engineer teams to support their customers and digs deep into the latest GenAI capabilities of KODAK Info Input intelligent document processing software. Here’s an excerpt of the discussion Michelle Ryder (MR): Kodak Alaris has a strong reseller network and relationships with distributors. How’s business in the channel currently, and where do you see opportunities for mutual growth? Hemel Thakrar (HT): Our partners have access to the entire portfolio of products from Kodak Alaris. While some [partners] may just concentrate on certain areas of that product line up, we’re seeing a lot of growth with partners that have started selling our software solutions as well as our hardware, that’s been a really big growth area for us over the past year. MR: Digital transformation is of course accelerating, is that resulting in new wins both for you and your partner base? HT: Absolutely, and that ties back to our portfolio – we have the largest range of document scanners available on the market and there’s the software solutions that we provide as well. Alongside that are the services that we offer – we have our own field engineers who provide onsite service, our own call centre here in the UK, and our own professional services team. MR: I think it’s fair to say the past year has been a challenging one for the scanner market. But Kodak Alaris has bucked the trend, what’s the secret to your success? HT: That’s a good question. Hard work! It’s been a real team effort. We don’t just rely on hardware sales; we’ve got this large portfolio of solutions as well. Customers wanting to do a tech refresh, might keep their scanners for a bit longer, because they might not have the money to replace them. With our software solutions, we can offer more services and more features in the overall solution to get them where they need to be at the current time. Just this morning, I was speaking to a customer who’s had a document scanner for 15 years. It’s not a reliability issue, it’s just keeping up with modern technology, and obviously operating systems and things like that. Older scanners will stop working on newer operating systems, so that’s when they really do need to be replaced. So not having to rely on hardware sales for recurring revenue has really been good for us, because we’ve got other areas that can bring us income and help to achieve our goals. MR: From a partner’s perspective, I would imagine that the ability to enable their customers to improve what they’ve already got, rather than invest in new hardware, builds customer loyalty. HT: Absolutely. If you can say to a customer, you don’t have to spend so much, because we can retain what you’ve already got in terms of the hardware and we can look at adding some more solutions with software to meet their requirements. If you put together a well-documented return on investment for a customer, they can get approval a lot easier when they can see that they’re going to save money in the long-term and that’s how we can win more deals, with our software solutions. MR: You have just launched a brand new scanner range. Can you talk us through the highlights of the S5000 Series? HT: There are three scanners in the S5000 range, there’s one that can process 160 pages per minute, the second 180 pages per minute, and the third 210 pages per minute. They all have the same features; they just have different speeds. One of the main features is a large operator control panel on the front of the scanner. It’s 9.3 inches, so it’s very large, and that incorporates a colour touch screen, which is about 7.5 inches. So, it looks like a large tablet on the front of the scanner. We’ve also put sorting capabilities in all three models, so you can out sort documents to two different pockets, and you can also do sorting based on the type of document. Maybe you want to output documents that include a barcode to a separate tray, or ones that are smaller in size, like an envelope for example. We’ve also included different connectivity types, so along with USB 3.0, we’ve also made the scanners network capable, so you can ONE-TO-ONE Hemel Thakrar
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