NCR did not have a good June in 2019. Fortunately for them, we’re here to make sure they start owning up to their issues and work to make things better for their customers, resellers, and partners. For the record, we’re okay with mistakes: they’re expected if you’re going to innovate and take risks. But NCR does the opposite, which is why we’re giving them grief.
Please, someone fix NCR. There’s so much storied success coming from that company it’s a shame to watch it disappear.
First up is NCR’s failure to find a bidder. In May of 2019 NCR tried, for the second time in five years, to go private. NCR likely needs to go private to repair a lot of what’s broken, but it’s stuck in an unfortunate position where someone needs to offer shareholders a premium to start the process. And just like last time no private equity group thought the dog was worth buying.
Going private affords NCR the necessary leeway to invest in R&D. According to some prior analysis of ours, NCR invests a meager 3.9% of revenues in R&D while software companies invest 15% on average. If NCR were to greatly increase R&D spend today the management would likely get a boot as activists swarmed (investing in R&D would depress earnings in the short term).
Since NCR has neglected to invest in R&D their products are outdated and market share is on the decline. Couple that with the fact the NCR happens to be in lines of business that are shrinking (ATMs, banking are 60% of NCR’s revenues but who needs ATMs when you have mobile payments?) and NCR is more like a distressed asset in need of a turnaround. This means offering a premium share price is entirely out of the question.
NCR’s strategy has been to be to acquire assets; just a few days ago they bought D3 Technology, a digital banking company. Banks suck at innovation so D3 exists in a quasi-agency capacity to implement basic technology updates. No matter, under current philosophies NCR will bleed D3 of innovative capital and talent, and it will be a zombie shell of itself in a few short years.
Next up is NCR’s data center crash that brought Target stores to their knees for 90 minutes on a Sunday afternoon. The first question is why is Target using NCR as a data center? There’s this thing called AWS that undoubtedly has way more uptime and stability than a hardware company that invests a paltry 3.9% of revenues in R&D (Amazon spent $23B on R&D last year in case you’re wondering). Target probably views Amazon as a competitor, however, and turns to someone like NCR instead. But isn’t Microsoft’s Azure a much better bet? We’re talking about a company that can’t even get their EMV payments product to work, after all.
Questionable decisions from Target’s management aside, the real tell tale sign was NCR’s unwillingness to offer comment on the matter. This is classic NCR hubris. How about, “We don’t yet know what happened but we’re looking it. We’re doing everything we can to fix the problem and ensure it doesn’t happen again.”
Nope. This is a cultural problem that starts and ends at the top.
Lastly, NCR’s Aloha has been removed Hilton’s approved vendors list. According to Hilton it actually happened two years ago yet NCR resellers are just finding out about this now.
I’ve connected with our Hilton Supply Management team, they’ve looked into this supplier and it looks like this happened two years ago, so no new changes here.
Hilton Press
NCR’s Aloha dealers have been angry as many of them can no longer sell into Hilton hotels. We haven’t heard the specific reason for this, and assumptions are dangerous, but you read this blog because we tend to make educated conjectures.
Reasons why Aloha didn’t make Hilton’s list of approved vendors:
- Glaring inoperability of current payment solution
- Outdated product
- Lower quality support
- High price of integrations
- Broken integrations, including one to property management systems that Hilton likely required
- Low availability of information remotely and high cost of maintenance
But you know that the worst part is? NCR didn’t even reach out to their dealers and explain why this was happening, or what they were doing to remedy the situation. Now you see why NCR’s dealers have picked up competing products to sell?
Things will undoubtedly get worse before they get better, if they even get better at all.
“But you know that the worst part is? NCR didn’t even reach out to their dealers and explain why this was happening, or what they were doing to remedy the situation. ”
As a POS Dealer and integrator (not Aloha), I’ve run into the poor downward communications from Software Manufactures. This communications problem is not specific to Aloha.
We are the eyes and ears of the industry the Brand Ambassadors, and its a shame the MFGs (not all) don’t value their Dealer channel as much as they should.
Dealers have a love-hate relationship with corporate. Some dealers are a necessary evil. The internet is proving that too many dealers fall into this category. Expect consolidation to continue as crappy dealers get pushed out