Kodak
Enhancing Printing Workflows with Cloud-based Solutions

Kodak positions itself as a global leader focused on printing technology innovations. Drawing inspiration from the legacy of Kodak's legacy, Kodak is helping businesses knock down huge obstacles to digital print adoption.

In an interview with CIO Applications magazine, Jim Barnes, Chief IT Implementation Officer, Kodak, sheds light on how the company is rewriting the narrative of the printing industry to drive it into the digital sphere. He also talks about how Kodak closely collaborates with clients to develop cloud solutions like the Prinergy On Demand Platform to provide better printing workflow automation for businesses.

What are the challenges that the customers of the print industry are facing today, and what approach does Kodak take to deliver solutions to mitigate it?

The printing industry is witnessing a sudden surge in consolidation efforts. This, in turn, is creating difficulty for print businesses in terms of productivity and automation at scale, requiring not just their workflow to be optimized but optimization of their overall business.

Be it a large enterprise or a small company, improving business productivity through implementing organizational software is undoubtedly becoming extremely vital. That is really a significant market challenge our company is addressing. We are embracing the cloud to offer our services to customers and add more value to their business.

Also, the consumers of this industry have an overwhelming expectation of getting high-quality prints. As a market leader, we help companies meet that expectation and undergo digital modernization by providing the best-suited and highest quality solutions. Our company works in direct partnership with our customers and makes sure the products and software we offer are industry leading.

There are certain key areas we are specifically proud of. We always say that Kodak knows color, and we mean that. We work hand-in-hand with our customers to ensure they have their color management set up correctly and empower them to deliver a high-quality printing experience. Our solutions are capable of maximizing ink usage while reducing wastage to deliver consistent and accurate color across digital press rooms.

When it comes to implementing the Prinergy On Demand Platform, we dedicate our time to paying individualized attention to our clients, ensuring we are appropriately addressing all their unique workflow-related requests. We offer support to improve customer experience and reduce the timeframe of the implementation.

Could you throw more light on the Prinergy On Demand Business Solution?

As a company, we take pride in our history, but it does not mean we care any less about progression. Our views are always towards moving forward.

We couple our expertise with the latest and greatest technologies emerging in the market to develop new software solutions and leverage cloud technology to enhance our already robust capabilities.

The Prinergy On Demand Business Solution streamlines printing workflows, optimizes color management, improves print quality, enables better use of data, and reduces manual touchpoints. It also augments the efficiency of printing companies through secure automation, integration, to ultimately help them sustain business growth and increases process efficiencies. The Prinergy On Demand Platform has given us a competitive edge and has been acknowledged as the trendsetter in the market by printing organizations.

What, according to you, differentiates Kodak from other players in the market?

The capabilities of our professionals have been attested to by our clients for being unique from the other market players. Our people and our movement to leverage cloud technologies are several factors that help us stand apart.

Today, the printing industry is lacking the support and resources to get the full value of cloud technologies and software. With our unmatched and advanced services, we aim to provide the support to clients they might not be getting from other market players.

Lastly, looking at the partnership we offer, our company puts together and delivers business solutions to help clients manage their business better. We have an end-to-end business solution that enables printing businesses to begin working in the cloud and create high-quality printing workflows. Putting all these factors together allows Kodak print to have a holistic competitive edge.

Could you cite a success story to highlight how you help your customers achieve success?

The best example I can think of is the partnership our company continues with our very first customer, Modern Litho. The client is a commercial and digital printing services company, with whom we have been working for a long time. Modern Litho has significantly been instrumental in getting our products ready for the market as they readily accepted to be early adopters of our solutions. They have not just been our client but rather, a partner, who has also collaborated with us on some other recent developments.

Today, Modern Litho uses a broad range of products developed and implemented by our company and has been one of the customers helping us move deeper into the business solution and printing process automation realm. Currently, they are directly collaborating with us on an ongoing project, helping us craft, build, and implement the world’s first fullyintegrated end-to-end print workflow solution.

What have you envisioned for Kodak in the upcoming 12 to 18 months?

In terms of geographical expansion, we are focusing on those regions where customers are ready for our business solutions. To that end, we have already extended our footprint in the markets of the U.S., Canada, and Europe. We are going to continue our focus on enhancing our cloud services and business solution capabilities and optimizing them to be used worldwide.

We are exploring newer ways to help our customers address certain technical challenges like disaster recovery and file management. We are looking forward to providing a fullyfeatured cloud software as a service solution to augment our current cloud offering.