Covering Disruptive Technology Powering Business in The Digital Age

Written by: Nur Atikah Yusri, Journalist, AOPG

2021 has been a year of innovation and transformation for many organisations worldwide. The pandemic changed the way businesses functioned, and enterprises can now clearly see the value of technological investments. Talk of integrating AI and machine-learning into aspects of a business to streamline processes and increase productivity has been met with growing acceptance as organisations put in their best efforts to recover as countries move from the pandemic to the endemic phase. Along these digital transformation journeys are organisations that provide the support and technology for businesses looking to move forwards. One such company is Kofax, an intelligent automation solution provider with customers in various industries across the globe.

Starting off 2022, the company recently held a media session to discuss their critical highlights in 2021 and the future for Kofax and its customers in the Asia-Pacific region. The session consisted of presentations from Zakir Ahmed, Senior Vice President & GM of Asia Pacific & Japan at Kofax, Greg Crowl, Director of Sales Engineering of Asia Pacific & Japan at Kofax, and Andrew Soon, Vice-President of Sales of MFDP – APJ at Kofax.

In his presentation, Zakir states, “We’re making this migration from being an on-premises company to becoming a cloud company where our solutions can now be used not just by large organisations but by small organisations as well and we call that the democratisation of software.” Kofax’s reach extends to over 25,000 customers and is partly driven by their partner ecosystems and various alliances. Zakir details that the partner ecosystem allows Kofax to have visibility across industries and regions, better connecting them to customers. These value-added partners also work in Kofax’s favour to satisfy customer demand.

Kofax began as a company that developed document capture solutions and has developed into what it is today with its intelligent automation platform. For the year 2021, Zakir reports, “One of the things that we saw was this huge uptick in automation as it continues to be the case, and that’s not because Covid is not entirely over.” 2021 for the business was about assisting their customers with digital adoption and transformations. During the session, Zakir also emphasised the importance of portfolio building. Mentioning some of the key acquisitions, including PSIGEN on their intelligent automation side and Printix on the print management side. As the company grows and attracts organisations worldwide, out of Kofax’s 25,000 customers, roughly 20% originate from the APJ region.

For this reason, Kofax has invested in putting a data centre within the region, so customers do not have to depend on the American or EMEA data centres, which leads to lower latency. From the sound of it, Kofax has plans to further expand within the Southeast Asia region as there is major market potential in the area.

On the side of Kofax’s solutions, Greg and Andrew approached the presentation from a capabilities point of view. They outlined what they had learned from customers’ demands in the past year, including remote working capabilities, employee welfare and satisfaction, supply-chain interactions, customer satisfaction, cost reduction, and better data quality. These issues indicated a need for AI/ML, data validation, fraud detection, intelligent automation, reduction of menial tasks, distributed workflow, multi-channel access and faster-personalised response. As Greg put it, these needs can be put under a blanket statement of intelligent automation. According to Greg, “If you had to break down our definition of intelligent automation, it would be a platform with all the tools necessary to automate an end-to-end business process and we think it’s key to look at it as an end-to-end process.”

Kofax’s intelligent automation platform performs a wide array of functions. But, “we’ve kind of distilled it down into three areas of capability that we think is very important in order to provide intelligent automation,” states Greg. The first of these three capabilities are document intelligence which encompasses AI, ML and NLP. Then, you have the connected systems which deal with ecosystem integration and mobile apps. While the third is process orchestration which includes BPM, RPA, process analytics, electronics signature, and personalised customer communications.

As a part of automating the end-to-end business process, Andrew introduced Kofax ControlSuite solutions, which is “a combination of advanced capture, print, and output management as well as mobile capability to apply security controls, track and monitor compliance policies and automate document collection processing, routing and storage tasks.” Partnered with Microsoft, Kofax’s ControlSuite “delivers enhanced cloud-based universal print solution to the market.” Greg asserts that Kofax’s solutions are easy-to-use for the end-user and can be deployed across different environments.

Kofax’s predictions for 2022 include most of what was expected by customers in 2021. Like many solution providers, the need to cater to the end-user is there, so the emphasis on simplicity and flexibility seems like a common theme that has run in 2021 and will continue in 2022. Kofax’s focus appears to be about adapting their Intelligent Automation platform to the needs of their customers and improving their AI, ML and NLP innovations.

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