If you were to analyze the current state of the POS market you’d notice that virtually all of the upstarts have neglected enterprise table service. The most common reasons given are that first, the feature requirements for serving enterprise table service are extraordinarily high, and second, that enterprise customers are too demanding to be worth the hassle. You can imagine a market Venn Diagram looking like the one below.
Accordingly there are few modern POS options that support this market. Here’s a rundown of our observations to check our analysis:
- Brink: nearly exclusively focused on QSR and fast casual. They have some table service customers but it’s not a focus today
- Micros: has Simphony but it doesn’t seem to be translating well to enterprise sales. Enterprise groups we know have discounted it as a workable alternative but we think that’s because Micros had a bad bout of initial bugs
- Northstar: has several table service enterprise customers though prospective customers have told us they’d like Northstar to have a bigger balance sheet before jumping onboard
- Qu: explicitly focused on QSR and fast casual enterprise. Even told their customer that opened a table service concept to use a different POS for that location
- Revel: focused on QSR and fast casual enterprise, has some smaller (<20 location) table service chains
- Toast: enterprise table service features might exist but they’ve been disqualified by every enterprise group we’ve talked with due to their business model of locked-in payments. Their enterprise sales team, however, promises some big announcements this quarter that will contradict this
- Touchbistro: serves table service but has generally avoided enterprise like the plague
- Xenial: wait for a future article, but it ain’t looking too good
What you therefore have are a number of Micros and NCR Aloha table service enterprise customers patching their existing legacy POS systems until they find a viable alternative. Our data here is driven by conversations with many of NCR’s own Customer Advisory Board (these are the same customers who gave NCR an NPS of -71, by the way). This is where a company like MediaWorks might me primed to take over.
If you’ve never heard of MediaWorks you’re not alone. But chances are that you use one of their POS products on a fairly regular cadence. That’s because MediaWorks started out building POS systems on a contract basis for some of the largest restaurant brands on the planet (think McDonald’s, Panera, and Subway for starters).
Over the last two decades MediaWorks took their POS knowledge from enterprise implementations across 95 countries to build a POS SaaS business. Now their growing client list includes some of the most recognizable quick service, fast casual, and table service brands out there. But you don’t know who they are because they’ve kept nearly 3,000 miles between their SaaS efforts and your belly.
“We’ve been focused on the international markets because North America has too much venture capital sloshing around to make most deals economic,” says Keith Pascal, COO of MediaWorks. “Overseas you don’t have to fight upside down economics and you still have the advantage of a wide feature moat with incumbents dropping the ball.” Keith says this as his current customers have nearly exclusively churned off well known POS solutions like Micros and NCR.
MediaWorks boasts compliance in over 30 countries, which is no small feat when you consider local tax, language, fiscal, and employment nuances. It’s a browser-based system so as not to be reliant on hardware, and has open APIs with many third parties. MediaWorks also scored high marks with Dr. Kevin Scoresby, one of the world’s leading ergonomists. “From a user interface perspective, MediaWorks POS has one of the most flexible implementations I’ve encountered. I’ve been impressed with their ability to customize the flow, layout, and style so we can optimize the experience for a specific client context.” MediaWorks got there through decades of R&D that led to a highly flexible and customizable configuration, which you’d understand is a huge deal if you’ve ever sold to enterprise customers.
The natural question then becomes when does MediaWorks start its sales efforts in North America? With so many dissatisfied enterprise accounts, it seems like the market is pulling MediaWorks this way. “We concentrate on international markets where there is far less competition. However, we support a number of American brands in their international markets and, if history repeats itself, we expect that, inevitably, these brands will ask us to support their domestic businesses as well.”
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