CUSTOMER PROFILE: Eastman Kodak

Eastman Kodak continues their hundred-year committment to customer convenience
with Broadvision One-To-One.

Kodak sold its first cameras pre-loaded with film. When all of the exposures had been taken, the customer sent the camera back to the company for processing and it was returned, along with the prints, reloaded with fresh film and ready to use.

From its very first efforts in the photographic marketplace over 100 years ago, Eastman Kodak has recognized the importance of customer convenience and leveraged that recognition into a dominant position in the photographic field, as well as a brand recognition rarely equaled in the modern world.

But the increasing convergence of the photographic and digital industries had begun to pose a substantial threat to their long-standing position of market leadership in film-based photography. If digital photography followed the path of many new technology products, a business model and a market would be apearing in less than two years. It was going to be a whole new ballgame for the photographc industry.

And Kodak was ready to play.

They knew that customer service was the key to winning the game, but they needed to find an application that was truly compelling; one where early adopters became evangelists. A century of experience in photography left no doubt as to the primary reason people take pictures - to share them with friends and family. On that foundation, they created The Kodak Picture Nework which offers customers a unique opportunity to view and share their pictures via the Web.

When customers take their film to be developed, they can request The Kodak Picture network. The pictures are returned along with a claim card and a code number which allows them - or anyone with whom they share their number - to view the pictures online. Pictures can be grouped in online virtual albums, and "picture postcards" can be emailed to friends.

To insure both the degree of personalization they felt necessary for these intimate experiences, as well as the secure privacy their customers would require, they built their killer app on Broadvision's One-To One. The primary reason Kodak chose One-To-One for personalization and transactional management was its unique architecture. They liked the session and state management, the three-tier CORBA environment, and its overall maturity.

Not only does Broadvison's One-To-One handle all the details of The Picture Network, as well as manage user accounts (orders history, personal profiles and passwords), its object-oriented environment enabled Kodak to create over 100 dynamic objects for back-end integration, transactions, image handling and formatting.

Broadvision's One-To-One suite of Web applications is helping Eastman Kodak build a technology-based mass market product that will leverage its strong brand equity and market dominance, and insure its leadership in photographic imaging technology for the next 100 years.