Ed Wingate is Head of Strategic Partnerships for Aluma. Before that he was a member of HP’s Security Advisor Board. Ed earned an engineering degree from Princeton and an MBA from Harvard Business School
In a recent interview with leading industry influencer, Kevin Craine, Ed discussed what he considers to be a revolution in the document processing market.
You can read the full transcript of the interview below.
Kevin: Hello this is Kevin Craine and I'm here with Ed Wingate Head of Strategic Partnerships at Aluma. We're talking about document processing and the document processing market. Ed, I've heard you say in the past that you feel there's a revolution occurring in the document processing market, can you explain what you mean?
Ed: Yes, I would say Kevin that the market is ripe for some disruption and specifically if we look historically at the market it's been dominated either by those players who provide batch capture of documents usually deployed in scanning centers or scanning bureaus or on the other side it's been in the document workflow applications' space which is complex in its own right.
Complexity and high cost are usually justified when the project is big enough to make the effort in deploying a new system. I think what we're seeing in the market is the need for digitization isn't just in large projects and isn't just for large enterprises. The need for digitization is pervasive. It's in small-medium businesses it's in individual departments that are currently being overlooked by their IT department because their needs don't rise to the top of the strategic hierarchy of IT projects and so I see a large swath of opportunity that's not currently being addressed by the existing document management players.
Kevin: Who are best positioned to drive and take advantage of that opportunity?
Ed: When I think about who's in the right position it's usually driven by who has the right to participate. And multifunction device providers, interestingly enough, are in a wonderful position to drive the change in the market. One may ask why is that? Because you don't typically associate multi-functions with that type of intense document workflow and it's because these multifunctions are pervasive they touch every document that's in the office today. Anything that needs to be digitized is gonna be going through that multifunction. Now currently the vast majority of multifunctions that are deployed - although they do have a lot of intelligence embedded within them, more often than not, when they scan a document they simply send it via email, send it to a repository, they send it and ensure that it's delivered but they don't necessarily add value before they engage in that transaction so while they possess that document for the three or four critical seconds when they possess the document, it's an opportunity to analyze the document and add some intelligence and value onto the document before it gets handed off to some other system. That's the opportunity that traditional MF providers or managed print services providers have as they possess every document that's digitized they can actually do the extraction, digitization and they can even engage in some of the initial workflow before they hand it off to a back-office system of record.
Kevin: How can Aluma help?
Ed: So one of the opportunities that MPS or MF providers have is that they have deployed technology but that deployed technology is pervasive but at the same time doesn't have substantial processing power. In order to put that intelligence on the device, we need to be able to make that intelligence accessible from any device. So what these MPs and MFD providers need is a cloud-based service architecture, a portfolio of document processing solutions that exist in the cloud, that are accessible from each and every multi-function and that's what Aluma does. What we do is we curated a set of functions around document processing whether it be classification, indexing, data extraction, redaction, bookmarking, etc that are all accessible through rest APIs and those rest APIs can be called from any application, any multifunction in any part of the workflow. And by allowing that easily accessible architecture to be accessible from everywhere, that allows each and every multifunction to provide that much more intelligence onto the document before it sends it off to some other system for processing.
