We met Allan Brown, vice president and general manager of Kodak’s Unified Workflow and Software Solutions business in end-April together with Subhrajit Ray, national business manager of Kodak’s Software and Solutions division, for the company’s India cluster. Essentially, the discussion centred round packaging software developments by the company.
While Kodak’s Prinergy 8 workflow software has a number of new packaging solutions, the need for stronger and better segment-branded packaging tools and modules was put forward by an interested observer at the meeting. Brown discussed several solutions that Kodak is in the process of rolling out, including the Insight Prepress Portal and the Insight Creative Workflow. Like many other software and prepress solution providers, Kodak has its eyes, at least, on the cloud. A number of cloud-based services have been released to large packaging customers in North America while some are still in beta testing. Among these are solutions that offer cloud services to customers including dynamic print planning and analytics with an intelligent dashboard. Kodak’s plan for a cloud-based packaging prepress solution portal includes strong back-up and archiving services for its customers.
Ray spoke about Kodak’s close relationship with Arden and its go-to-market strategy for India, whereby both Kodak and Arden will jointly address the opportunity for selling Arden’s Impact Cad structural design software for packaging. Ray is familiar with the structural design software environment and market while Kodak, as we have written before, has in the past three or four years made considerable inroads to the packaging market. It’s Flexel NX technology which has several new screening technologies in the immediate pipeline, has a good footprint in the flexo prepress imaging segment in the country.
While speaking about a variety of the products still in the pipeline or being readied for market, Brown implied that the company is keen to leverage its strong equity in color science and materials technology. “We need to leverage our prepress, print and software know-how. Kodak is investing in software which is one of the growth pillars of the company. Our chief executive officer, Jeff Clarke, has given us [software solutions] the resources to grow, because it is a growth pillar.
