Cary Sherburne:  Hi, I’m Cary Sherburne, Senior Editor at WhatTheyThink.com and I'm here with Judy Pribe, who is Vice President of Marketing at Kodak.  Welcome. 

Judy Pribe:  Hi, Cary.  Thank you.

Cary Sherburne:  You’re involved with the Services Organization at Kodak and maybe you could tell us a little bit about how that organization functions and how it’s changed over the last year or two.

Judy Pribe:  So over the last year or two, Kodak has invested in growing our services businesses, and when I say businesses I mean it really encompasses an awful lot.  Many people think of service as technical or break-fix type services, but we’ve really expanded into a number of different areas.  We are collaborating with our customers primarily to help them grow their business.  What we want is for them to be able to discover ways not only to grow, but to focus in on what will help them grow.  And so the types of services that we provide are consultative at first; discovering with them, taking a journey with them to understand what their issues are, what’s most challenging for them.  

Very often we uncover things that allow for us to focus in on areas of improvement, of enabling products that they’ve invested in, optimizing the performance of their existing environment.  Sometimes it’s just covering and providing break-fix service for all of the manufacturers’ equipment that they have inside of their environment.  And really, it does go beyond equipment.  It includes support and technical services for what’s whatever within their four walls—software, hardware, anything that they have.

Cary Sherburne:  So you really are focused on a holistic approach to the customer so it’s not, you know, this is the stuff with the red and yellow and we’re doing this and that’s all.  It’s you’re really doing a multi-vendor approach.

Judy Pribe:  Most of what we do is in a multi-vendor environment.  In fact, I’d say practically all of what do is a multi-vendor environment.  And what’s exciting about it is that what our goal is really is to help them optimize their business, and so we’d like them to do it with our products.  Many of our products, as you know, are advantaged in the markets they compete in.  But sometimes customers have different choices that they’ve made, and so it doesn’t mean that we’ll shun them or we won’t support them.  

So the journey that we take with them from discovery right through to scoping what it would be, what their investment needs to be; sometimes it’s people, sometimes it’s portfolio—ours or others.  We often will work very hard with them during implementation, providing services that not only deploy what it is that we’ve decided together that they need, but also to train their people to go through the change management that’s necessary.  You know, our industry has been going through digital transformation for a long time, and digital transformation in any industry, including this one, is not easy.  And so what we want to do is try to make it as seamless, as value-creating, and really as effective as we can.

Cary Sherburne:  That’s great.  And so in terms of the presale mode, I mean don’t you go in also and help them understand if they do this kind of a purchase what kind of an ROI are they going to get and those kinds of analyses?

Judy Pribe:  Yes, we do.  So the first thing we do is we assess their business, and very often it’s a discussion with very senior people in the organization.  If we can tap into the most senior that’s really important because knowing what’s on the senior manager’s mind is really at the heart of where the business needs to go.

Cary Sherburne:  Right, exactly.

Judy Pribe:  And so we’ll meet with them and we’ll understand, and we’ll do some synthesis, we’ll assess what alternatives are, and we’ll come back and work with a broader team.  And once we’ve done that, we’ll put in place a set of measures, objectives for return on investment.  We don’t leave it there after implementation and deployment; we come back and make sure that we are measuring against what we’ve said.

Cary Sherburne:  That’s great.  Well, thank you very much.

Judy Pribe:  Thank you, Cary.