Friday 21st February, 2014

I.R.I.S., member of the Canon Group has announced its partnership with Scytl Secure Electronic Voting S.A.. With the successful delivery of  election projects in Ecuador and Honduras, the two companies continue planning further collaboration during 2014.

Scytl is the leading provider of election management and online voting solutions that ensure transparent, secure, accessible and auditable elections. I.R.I.S. specialises in automated document classification and data extraction – to make relevant information available for following processes. By partnering with I.R.I.S., Scytl can further automate election processes to ensure the results are quickly available.

Pablo Sarrias, EVP Corporate Development, Scytl: “We were impressed not only by the excellent extraction technology provided by IRISXtract™ for Documents, but also by I.R.I.S.’ commitment. Our partnership started under extremely challenging conditions – we had two months to deploy 105 scanning centers and to train more than 1,500 people working with the solution. It was challenging, but in the end a resounding success.”

The two companies designed a holistic solution for the Ecuadorian election, which optimized the entire election process. I.R.I.S. state-of-the-art Intelligent Document Recognition (IDR) technology and the extraction capabilities of the XContext engine were the missing pieces to Scytl’s end-to-end integrated e-Election Platform. Thanks to the easy integration of I.R.I.S. technologies into subsequent information systems the solution design was very efficient.

The data extracted from the reports, as well as any metadata, could then be gathered, subsumed in a data base, and evaluated to check if the results were correct and plausible, and no rigging had been done.

With four elections being handled simultaneously in Ecuador, not only was sophisticated technology key, but also excellent organizational skills were required. Scytl took over the entire election management from start to finish. Manfred Traeger, Sales Director Outsourcing Services, I.R.I.S. AG acknowledges: “We are grateful for partnering with Scytl in this global and demanding environment. They have a strong expertise in election management which coupled with our technology, allows them to carry out elections more efficiently. The election in Ecuador was an exceptional project that made full use of both of our technological capabilities. Automatically processing the reports allowed for the data to be quickly available and to give parties and the community regular reports on the status of the election results.“

Gerard Cervelló Garcia, VP Sales Operations, Scytl: “Working in such a complex market with different country-specific requirements, calls for business partners who are competent, flexible and committed. I.R.I.S. has proven to be such a partner. The project went as specified, not only because we were able to design this excellent solution, but also thanks to the performance of the I.R.I.S. teams before, during and after the election.”

After the successful implementation and joint collaboration supporting the elections in Ecuador and Honduras, Scytl and I.R.I.S. are looking forward to ongoing partnering opportunities across the globe. In recognition of the successful implementation of the joint project in Ecuador, Scytl was recently named the “Best Performing BPO” during the IRISLink 2014 awards ceremony.