Kodak Alaris is providing scanning systems for the ballot count in next week’s Shura elections in Oman, as the region’s document scanner market booms, writes Eliot Beer, Intelligent CIO’s Editorial Consultant at GITEX Technology Week in Dubai, UAE.
The firm is working with a local partner to supply the system for scanning and reading the votes, according to David Whitton, eastern cluster manager, document scanning, at Kodak Alaris: “That’s based on [information capture firm] IBML technology which sorts the ballot papers. We’re using intelligent character recognition in a unique way for the Omani market – this is an open-text engine.”
Kodak Alaris also counts the UAE’s Emirates NBD as a customer, with its scanning systems in all 140 of the bank’s branches across the country.
Its main focus at Gitex is to show off its web capture systems, which allow scanning to be integrated into other business processes more seamlessly. Firms can also provision and manage Kodak Alaris’ software remotely, saving on the need to provide IT support services at many locations.
The firm has seen its sales grow significantly in recent years, said Whitton: “[In the first half of the year] we sold 17,000 units – Fujitsu probably sold about 19,000. We used to be 10,000 units behind them – we’re catching up, and we’ll probably overtake them fairly quickly.”
According to Whitton, Infosource data on the regional scanner market shows a growth rate of 35% for H1: “In the first half of last year in the Middle East there were 39,000 devices sold – this year it’s 53,000. It’s a mature market in Europe, but in the Middle East there’s still a lot of paper to process, and a lot of backlog conversion jobs to be done before we get to a more mature and stable market state – so I think there’s plenty of growth left in the market.
“I’ve been coming here since 1999 – everyone’s always been saying the market will commoditise and decline, and it never quite does,” he added.
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