Kodak Alaris is expanding its distribution network in South Africa, appointing local IT distributor Kolok to sell its full range of document scanners as it looks to reach more businesses through the country’s reseller market.
Announced on 30 October, the agreement gives Kodak Alaris access to Kolok’s network of approximately 2,500 resellers. The company already works with three other distributors in South Africa, so the appointment adds to its existing sales network rather than replacing it.
Kolok distributes IT equipment, printers and office technology products across the country. For Kodak Alaris, the appeal is fairly straightforward: more resellers selling its scanners means more opportunities to reach businesses that still handle substantial amounts of paperwork, particularly in financial services, healthcare and education.
“South Africa is a strategically important market for Kodak Alaris, and appointing Kolok as our distributor is an important step in our next phase of development,” said Elias Mouchantaf, Kodak Alaris’ regional business director for the Middle East and Africa, Southern and Eastern Europe, and Asia-Pacific.
The company wants to build more consistent sales across its scanner range, rather than depending on occasional large orders. Kolok’s established relationships with resellers should give it a way to do that, although neither company has disclosed sales targets or how much additional business it expects the agreement to generate.
There’s also an established market for the equipment. Businesses may have moved much of their work online, but paper records haven’t disappeared. Banks still process signed forms, healthcare providers deal with patient documents, and companies often have years of records that need to be digitised.
Kodak Alaris sells scanners for those jobs, ranging from desktop models for smaller offices to high-volume machines used by organisations processing thousands of pages. Its document capture products also support businesses that want to extract information from scanned documents and use it in other applications.
That’s become part of the conversation around enterprise AI, where companies are trying to make better use of the information they already hold. As the growing focus on enterprise data storage and AI infrastructure shows, getting information into a digital system is only one part of making it usable. Businesses still need to organise and manage that information before automated systems can reliably work with it.
The Kolok agreement, however, is specifically for Kodak Alaris’ scanner hardware. It doesn’t announce a new software product or an expansion of the company’s document processing services.
Kolok chief executive Warren Strauss said the distributor sees an opportunity to introduce Kodak Alaris’ equipment to more customers through its existing reseller relationships.
“Our business is built around trusted vendor relationships, reliable distribution and helping resellers respond to changing customer needs,” Strauss said.
The companies plan to work together on reseller training, marketing and sales, with a focus on industries that regularly process large volumes of documents. That includes both high-volume production scanning and smaller devices used in individual offices.