| | April 20199CIOReviewthe challenge of ecosystems management. To illustrate ecosystem development from our own experience, we have built a host of products around our Picture Kiosks. Through a smartphone app, images can be uploaded over the internet and returned as individual prints, collated into a book, or printed on specialty items. This is the basic service, but adding the ability for people to privately share their images means an ecosystem can be built. Pictures taken at memorable events, such as weddings, birthday celebrations or group holidays, can be offered to attendees and they can create their own personal mementos of the big event instantly. This is much quicker and easier than the old way of physically getting together to look at pictures and then having to make reprints for each attendee.This approach is also transforming business processes and simplifying and improving the way people work. We are using scanners, cameras, email, social media platforms, phones, kiosks, and biometric devices as on-ramp devices to deliver content to intelligent document management systems and higher value business processes and services, such as ERP and CRM systems. The software supplied to achieve this can be instantly upgraded and configured remotely; hardware issues can also be remotely diagnosed and, in many cases, fixed.The key is to look for opportunities for innovation and ways to encourage ecosystems to develop so that everyone buys in to the changes. Innovation is neither the preserve of a lone company visionary nor for a dedicated brainstorming group. It should be open to everyone involved to voice their ideas based on their daily experiences and insight. Only in this way will innovations emerge that provide value that transcends existing experiences.Obviously, there needs to be a panel of experts to evaluate the desirability and feasibility of each suggestion. At Kodak Alaris we have an Innovation and New Markets team whose charter is to establish a broad innovation process and encourage necessary culture changes to empower employees to identify and develop opportunities to constantly improve our ecosystem of products and services.There is plenty of room to incorporate the tremendous amount of innovation required to keep us at the top of our game, and the agility and dynamic scalability of our cloud infrastructure enables innovation to occur at an accelerated pace and in a cost-effective way. By building-in monitoring and analytics, we can also gain a better understanding of customer behavior, which can aid the constantly flowing innovation stream.Cloud economics of the platform-as-a-service (PaaS) model means we only pay for what we use and further cost benefits will be realized through the introduction of micro services. From the customer perspective, they benefit from the use of Global Traffic Management (GTM) which offers better performance and lower latency from a data center nearer to their operations centres. In addition, IoT features for feedback and control brings in data that previously cost a lot in time and effort to amass. It can also open new doors, because the data can be viewed across a range of disparate environments for hardware, software and services combinations, which can lead to new thinking and the development of previously undreamt of combinations of products and services.Based on our experience, cloud deployment of M2M and IoT technologies can create a great number of opportunities to delight customers with really useful tools in the shape of products and services. As time passes and new solutions emerge through the innovation process, they can be rolled out quickly, to ascertain their real-world value and sort the real ecosystem blockbusters from the less popular services, without having to invest a fortune. Cloud deployment of M2M and IoT technologies can create a great number of opportunities to delight customers with really useful tools in the shape of products and servicesDan Hurst
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