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Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a technology that we're slowly becoming more exposed to as new products are developed to make everyday tasks easier.  AI actually had a bit of an interesting start - it grew from the technology used to break the German Enigma codes in World War II, however we are more familiar with its more benign uses in beating chess champions or even in our virtual phone assistants.  Enterprises have been quietly developing AI-based cybersecurity strategies that are proving to have promise in protecting systems and even are being used in counterterrorism efforts.  These developments are explored in an article on Computer Weekly.

Using declassified US defense and intelligence strategies, entrepreneur Drew Perez founded Adatos, a Singapore-based AI startup that has developed software to produce data-driven insights quickly.  Perez says that machine learning is a popular tool among intelligence services and the US military to process large amounts of data, and advances have made the usefulness of the interpreted data incredible.  "The current demands in counter-terrorism require precise, accurate insights delivered in the span of minutes,” he says. “A key contest in war will be between adversary cognitive systems – artificial and human – to process information, understand the battlespace and decide and execute faster than the enemy."

However, Perez cautions that we need not fear that AI become a sentient threat like it is in the movies; "AI, if defined by the expectations of cognitive functions that mimic humans, is still largely in a development stage, but it doesn’t mean it can’t solve real-world problems much more efficiently.”

AI is used in many applications that we may not even notice - in customer services, robo-advisors (think IKEA's "Anna"), retail projections, robotics, and even in interpreting metical data - but the technology is always improving and we are seeing more and more of it at our fingertips.  Surveillance systems can be programmed to search for the faces of wanted persons within a feed, and Tesla has even introduced the beginnings of mass produced autonomous cars with its Autopilot feature.

In cybersecurity, machine learning allows systems to recognize known threats and respond to their attacks appropriately.  Attackers and their methods can also be filed into a database for future reference, but where this technology falls short is in handling new threats - the system simply does not have the data to draw on.  To address this "high-fidelity machine learning" is available, which "runs tests before and during malware execution, allowing security applications to halt malicious operations halfway and kick malware out of the system."  High-fidelity machine learning can also reduce false positive, behavioral analysis, and preventing OS exploitation.  With automation on board, the system load required to handle security issues can be reduced.

AI has its limitations though - it lacks the ability of deep analysis and data is difficult to process when it exists in silos.  Algorithms also vary in accuracy.  Ultimately - AI should not be used as a tool to replace people just yet.  It lacks the ability to understand the intricacies of human expression and cultural norms and is likely to offend more than help, but these issues improve every day.

Read more on this article at Computer Weekly.

In an article published recently by Computer Weekly, author Caroline Donnelly explores how recent improvements to the "speed limit" of sending data to the cloud have made the technology more accessible than ever.  Given this, enterprises should double down on their efforts to move their data off-premise.

At the Google Cloud Next Conference in San Francisco, executive chairman of Alphabet (Google's parent company) Eric Schmidt spoke of these speed limits and how they've been problematic for companies so far.  “There was a speed limit, and that speed limit was defined by our ability to work with the data we have and the install base that you have, and moving it into this new model,” he said, "the 'new model' allows firms to deploy and update applications at a faster pace than ever before, and handle far higher amounts of user traffic."  With the new model ideas and products developed on an individual workstation can be in the cloud and scalable within seconds.  It's that easy, Schmidt says.

Schmidt also gives two examples of recent products that have been wildly successful but heavily dependent on cloud services - Pokemon Go and Snapchat.  Pokemon Go, an augmented reality mobile game app based on the popular 90's anime (and a favorite of PaperFree staff) experienced 50 times more demand in its first two hours than had ever been optimistically planned.  Though this did bring about difficulty in users connecting to its server, the fact that it was able to operate at the capacity that it did under load was a testament to the Google Cloud service it was hosted on.  And, also in the mobile apps market is Snapchat, a video and photo-sharing service whose lightning fast development for Android and iPhone platforms is credited to Google's cloud infrastructure.  Snapchat was also developed with very little available capital thanks to Google having already done the hard lifting.  To enterprises considering joining the cloud, Schmidt says “[You might say] I’m not trying to be Pok├®mon Go, but if you could you’d be pretty happy. Think about the global success. So you might as well plan for global success and infinite demand because, even if you don’t get it, your architecture will be right and your costs will be lower” and “Are you not planning to be like Snapchat? Well, I think everyone here represents a corporation that would be happy to be as successful as they are,” he added.

To companies who have delayed moving to the cloud or are working on it as they can, he says “Just get to the cloud now. Just go there now. There is no time to waste anymore.”

Cloud services have often touted the "adopt or die" threat over the years, but as Donnelly reports, these services now have the success stories to back them up.  Amazon anyone?  She also lists other leading corporations who are currently undertaking massive migration projects with Google: Disney, Verizon, and Colgate-Palmolive, who transferred 28,000 employees onto the Google G Suite over the course of a weekend.

The size and complexity of the projects moving to the cloud, with the scope of the short timeframes they're being done in, is a fascinating and exciting view into the elvolving world of cloud services and their unlimited potential.  Instead of being used for overflow storage, more and more companies are taking the "lift and shift" approach and moving their entire operations off-premise and reaping the benefits of scalability, reliability, and cost savings.

Read more on this article on Computer Weekly

Kofax, a developer of enterprise content management software and PaperFree partner, recently made three exciting announcements in an email to partners.  Firstly, they announced the consolidation of products under the Lexmark Enterprise Software name into the Kofax line, forming a single brand of enterprise software.  This assists Kofax in streamlining their product line, enhancing marketing efforts, and removing confusion over which products are which.

Like EMC, Kofax has also announced a revamped partner program.  Their updates "reflect a deeper commitment to our valued partners [with] greater access to products, training, deal protection, new Solutions and Professional Services designations and more."  This program covers all brances of the Kofax software offerings - includuing Kofax, Readsoft, Perceptive, and Lexmark Healthcare - and provides partners with various tools to help sell Kofax products.  Learn more about the new program.

Kofax also announced their 2017 Inspire conference, which will be held in Nashville in April.  This annual conference aims to bring knowledge and tools to both ends of the ECM community - sellers and consumers.  Learn more about the 2017 Inspire conference.

On Friday, February 10 the PaperFree employees participated in their first ‘Company Day’.  As a day set aside specifically for team building, training, and other activities, company days are an excellent opportunity to bring all the company’s many departments together for one purpose.  For this first event, all the employees were treated to morning CPR certification classes taught by the American Red Cross.  Though PaperFree is not in the business of medical care, CEO James Robinson shared that he had an experience where someone was in medical distress and he found himself unsure of his CPR training from many years prior.  He shared that any one of the employees could find themselves in his shoes and having the opportunity to be trained could end up saving a life.  In addition to adult CPR, employees were trained on infant CPR, choking emergencies, and how to set up and use AED devices.  Many PaperFree employees have young children so the additional training modules are certainly a benefit to have at home.

For the second part of the day employees split into teams and gave a thorough cleaning and dusting to all their offices, conference rooms, break rooms, etc. - helping to build a sense of responsibility in maintaining one's work and common areas.  All in all, we'll call the first Company Day a success!

PaperFree looks forward to the opportunities that Company Days provide and is excited to organize more in the future.

Earlier this month Dell EMC announced a new Integrated Partner Program that combines two solid legacy programs into one.  This move was made to address the needs of partners today and also to account for the changing future.  The program is arranged into a set of tiers - Titanium, Platinum, and Gold, plus an invitation-only Titanium Black sub-tier - that correspond to service levels and to clarify the steps needed for a partner to advance to the next partnership level.  Benefits to the respective tiers include rebates, training services, and the ability to sell the full Dell EMC portfolio and are in place to help partners grow their business with Dell EMC.

This unified program includes all walks of ECM technology life; solution providers, cloud service providers, strategic outsourcers, OEM partners, systems integrators, and distribution partners.  The partnership tiers have also been fine tuned to each type of provider for the most effective program possible.

Developed with input from partners, the program abides by the mantra "Simple, Predictable, and Profitable".  From the press release:

SIMPLE: RESOURCES AND TECHNOLOGY ENABLEMENT -- UNIFIED PARTNER PORTAL

To enhance the partner experience, there will be one portal for the Dell EMC Partner Program, streamlined with distinctive views for each partner type and partner track providing a wealth of necessary enabling information. The single point of entry portal for all partners is scheduled to go live the week of February 20, 2017.

Through the portal, Dell EMC partners will have access to needed tools and resources including:

• Rebate and MDF Tracking
• Sales & Marketing Tools
• Program Guides & Event Kits
• Country Specific Benefits & Requirements
• FAQs
• Training & Competencies
• Deal Registration
• Services & Support Resources
• Quoting & Purchasing Tools

PREDICTABLE: RULES OF ENGAGEMENT

Dell EMC is committed to rewarding partners for driving new business. Through a fully integrated and streamlined process, as well as a globally enforced Partner Code of Conduct, the Deal Registration program helps protect those partners who actively promote Dell EMC’s products and solutions to their customers. Partners with registered and approved opportunities receive both advantaged pricing as well as protection from direct sales conflict.

PROFITABLE: RICH REBATES & MDF

The opportunity for profitability is a cornerstone of the program awarding eligible partners with lucrative rebates. Base rebates are paid back to dollar one and growth rebates reward partners who successfully grow their respective Dell EMC lines of business over time. And partners who attach services to expand into new lines of business can earn additional rebates on top of the base and growth rebates. In addition, there is an infusion of $150 million of incremental investment opportunities to boost back-end rebates and MDF, both earned and proposal based.

Dell EMC has made a commitment to its product and the partners who make it possible and it shows in the revamped partner program.  To read more about the new Integrated Partner Program please read more at Dell EMC's press release.

In a recent blog post, Kofax explored the changing world of the insurance industry.  They narrowed their findings down to a handful of categories; legacy systems, new product models to compete with, and millennials.  Millennials?  How do they impact insurance companies?  Turns out, they have a lot to do with how companies run their customer service end.  Millennials want information quickly, via the internet, and in simple packages that are easy to understand.  They want to be able to sign up for coverage via a website, receive an approval or denial quickly, and also to be able to manage their policy through a customer interface, without having to call into a customer service line between 9am and 5pm.  For a traditionally paper-based industry such as insurance, this can be quite a change but thanks to the technology that can automate the approval process and a variety of customer portals these options are becoming more readily implemented, and can be enjoyed by all customers.

The second change Kofax noted was the prevalence and burden of legacy systems.  Many enterprises outgrow their customized software but can't find a way to transfer that business data from one platform to a new, fully featured one.  Many of these old systems also lack the analytics that help to drive process improvement.  According to Kofax's article, most insurance companies are about 95 years old and have long relied on paper-based processing.  But, as technology changes the need to migrate to a system that can process the intricacies and data collection required by insurance companies is inevitable.  However, according to Kofax "This is not to say that you should take a rip-and-replace approach. That would be too risky to your core operation. A staged, augment-and-adapt method is a more prudent choice."

One way insurers are coping with the need for new software but access to old data is an interesting one - "swivel chair integration".  Swivel chair integration is a method where one database is literally typed into the new one, manually, while looking at the respective databases pulled up on two screens.  As one can imagine, this process is fraught with downsides (even the fact that millennials will complain is noted).  However, another option is available in robotic process automation (RPA for short).  This method replicates the process of swivel chair integration, but replaces the human operator with a technological process to capture the data and transfer it over.  However, it is to be noted that RPA is not a software that is a backbone to the enterprise - it simply acts as an aid to get the new software up and running.  RPA is a great utility for "old-meets-new" conundrums.

The last evolution facing the insurance industry is the idea of new product formats - peer to peer, pay as you go, on demand, and direct to consumer models.  These models appeal to a variety of needs and price points, but are a relatively new endeavor for traditional insurers and can also put insurers at risk.  This is an area that is still undergoing change and how technology will play a role is still to be determined.

Kofax closes their post by posing a series of questions to consider when determining how to better your insurance enterprise's process or integration of technology:

1. Do you have areas that are underperforming?
2. Do you have rigid applications or information siloes creating bottlenecks?
3. Are there processes that can’t be scaled unless you hire more people?
4. Do you have employees performing repetitive, manual tasks?
5. Are your employees constantly copying and pasting information between internal and external systems?
6. Do you have highly paid knowledge workers dedicated to time-consuming administrative tasks?
7. Are data-entry errors creating frequent rework or exception handling?
8. Is your company considering outsourcing processes that you would prefer to keep in-house?

As a Kofax partner, PaperFree can help insurers or companies in any vertical to better manage their data capture and application in ways that can stand the text of time.  To learn more about how we can help you, please contact us.

One of the advancing technologies in our day is the use of "smart machines" - machines that are are capable of cognitive computing, artificial intelligence, intelligent automation, machine learning, and deep learning - and these machines are poised to change the way businesses operate.  Gartner reports that almost a third of larger companies will make use of smart machine technology by 2021.

Susan Tan, research vice-president at Gartner, suggests the different ways that smart machines could be used to change the way work is done: “[smart] machines will profoundly change the way work is done and how value is created. From dynamic pricing models and fraud detection to predictive policing and robotics, smart machines have broad applicability in all industries.”  This technology could even be used to "help organizations assess, select, implement, change and adapt talent, and for IT and business processes" according to Computer Weekly.

Smart machines will also come with a hefty investment as well - in 2016 companies spent $451 million on the technology but that number is expected to rise to $29 billion in 2021.  This increasted investment is indicative of how flexible the machines are and how readily they can solve problems that dog products, or even offer up a way to proactively improve products or processes.  BMW, for example, has teamed up with IBM Watson to evaluate how to improve the driver experience and GE has developed Predix, which monitors machine sensors and translates that to predictions on maintenance needs.  Though simple in concept, these methods stand to inprove the industrial sector's ability to streamline processes and operate more efficiently, one tiny adjustment at a time that will accrue billions in savings over time.

Over the next decade smart machines are expected to become an integral utility for system integrators to provide advanced services for their clients, such as strategic design, training, deployment, integration, expansion, and ongoing refinement.  And, smart machines aren't grounded either - many approaches are being made to move them to the cloud for more strategic and dispursed applications.

To learn more about smart machines please visit Computer Weekly.

Last week PaperFree partner OpenText announced definitive plans to acquire Guidance Software, a Pasadena-based developer of forensic security solutions.  The acquisition adds to OpenText's product offerings, specifically its Discovery line that that offers search, extraction, classification, review, and analysis tools for enterprises.  This also adds additional information security options to OpenText with new digital investigation, forensic security, and endpoint solutions.  Guidance Software is well known for its EnCase product, which OpenText describes as the "gold standard" in forensic security.

Under the agreement OpenText will offer to purchase all common shares Guidance Software shares for $7.10 each in cash, for a total of $240 million, and then an additional offer to purchase remaining untendered shares.  Factoring in Guidance Software's cash on hand, the value of the enterprise is approximately $222 million.  OpenText intends to commence the acquisition in early August and plans to fund the transaction via cash on hand plus short term financing.  The sale is expected to close in the third quarter of 2017.

This article was based on a July 26, 2017 OpenText press release.  Read the press release here.

OpenText has announced the completion of its acquisition of Dell EMC's Enterprise Content Division, effective January 23, 2017.  This acquisition, which also includes the popular Documentum suite as well as other core ECM products, carried a price tag of $1.62 billion and was funded by a combination of cash on hand, stocks, senior notes, and credit.  Through this process, which has taken nearly a year, OpenText has made strides to ensure that ECD partners and their clients would experience as seamless of a transition as possible.

"I want to personally welcome every Documentum, InfoArchive, and LEAP customer and partner to the OpenText family," said OpenText's CEO and CTO Mark J. Barrenechea, "and express our commitment to helping you maximize your investments in ECM technologies. We will continue to innovate, invest in, and provide full support for the Documentum portfolio, as well as our existing ECM solutions. With OpenText you now have a business partner that is as focused on the success of your company’s digital future as you are.

Rest assured that maintaining and improving your customer experience is a key objective as we move through the integration process. Your satisfaction and continued patronage is important to us and we plan to make the transition to OpenText as seamless as possible. We have no plans to change your existing service levels, and intend to fully leverage the expertise of the ECD team."

As PaperFree is heavily invested in the ECD products involved in this acquisition, it has taken a keen interest in the process as it unfolds.  Fortunately, we have seen no interruptions in our ability to provide exceptional products to serve our customers' content management needs and are optimistic about the ongoing relationship with OpenText as it becomes the new provider for our core products.

To learn more about the products OpenText recently acquired, please visit the Documentum, InfoArchive, and LEAP pages on our site.

Earlier this month Dell EMC announced the introduction of the ProDeploy Client Suite, a tool that helps enterprises deploy PCs faster, easier, and with better ability to control the process.  The system is offered with three service levels so that customers can fine tune services to their needs, while also enjoying available training and certification to streamline the process from start to finish.

This utility comes from recent research that shows that enterprises who rely on a vendor to prepare and deploy workstations realize significant cost savings and quicker access to those workstations.  ProDeploy Client Suite connects businesses to Dell EMC partners that can handle the planning, configuration, installaton, and data migration for the new systems needed.  Customers are assigned a manager to act as a single point of contact to access the services that they need.  The utility also comes with access to the self-service TechDirect portal for updates on their work order.

According to Jeff Clarke, Dell vice chairman, Operations and president, Client Solutions Group, "[The] differentiated services are a big reason customers buy from Dell. ProDeploy Client Suite provides IT managers the flexibility to outsource time-consuming deployment tasks that divert IT staff from more critical initiatives.  They can now focus on delivering a great end-user experience and increase productivity by putting a fully- configured system in their employees' hands.”

ProDeploy Client Suite is availble in three service levels.  Dell EMC provides the following service level descriptions:

• Basic Deployment : Systems are prepared for deployment and arrive with the image loaded, BIOS configured and asset tag applied.
• ProDeploy : In addition to the Basic Deployment features, a deployment engineer develops an implementation plan covering all aspects of installation and configuration of hardware and system software, 24/7 onsite installation and post-deployment knowledge transfer. Customers can also use the ImageAssist tool to quickly create, deploy and maintain a single cross-platform dynamic image. In third-party testing, ImageAssist took up to 88% less customer administration time than manual image creation.
• ProDeploy Plus : This end-to-end service addresses every task required to get new PCs from the factory to desk, up and running fast. In addition to the ProDeploy features, ProDeploy Plus customers can use Dell Connected Configuration to set up a factory distribution point for their Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager to securely configure BIOS, image and domain join, which lowers onsite effort. They also receive data migration with secure data wipe of legacy systems, training credits to use at any time, 30-day post-deployment support, and a dedicated ProSupport Technical Account Manager.ProDeploy Plus can help reduce the amount of time it takes to deploy PCs by 35% and save up to $620 per PC deployed.

According to Dell EMC "The ProDeploy Client Suite also fully enables Dell EMC channel partners with a framework designed to supplement their capabilities, grow services revenue and deliver the best possible deployment experience to their customers. Partners have the flexibility to resell or co-deliver deployment services. With training and certification accessed through TechDirect, partners who attain the Deployment Services Competency by passing the corresponding exam gain access to Dell EMC methodologies and tools while becoming eligible to co-deliver ProDeploy Plus and ProDeploy."

To learn more about ProDeploy Client Suite please read the press release here.