Do You Resell Aloha POS? Here’s The Best Free Consulting You’ll Ever Get

It’s been a tough time as an NCR Aloha reseller over the past few years. If you’ve at all paid attention to our articles you’d know the reasons – and they’re unfortunately numerous.

Fortunately, most Aloha resellers haven’t forgotten that they have choices and they’ve picked up non-NCR products to sell. Sorry NCR, but this isn’t North Korea and nobody is being held at gunpoint to sign your exclusive reseller agreement. Shame on you.

But NCR has been doing something that dealers need to emulate, and they should do it as soon as possible.

When merchants onboard an Aloha systems they agree to NCR’s end user license agreement, or EULA for short. Section 6 of this agreement details some specifics that the data-savvy know well. This is where Aloha resellers need to pay attention. Here’s the abbreviated text for your review:

6.  Access to Your Computer System.  You agree to allow NCR and its authorized resellers reasonable access to Your computer system and the Software in order to provide any applicable maintenance and support services, to verify license status, and to change settings and/or install or remove applications to address data security risks.

Stop here. This means that NCR can cook up any reason that fits their definition of “maintenance, support, or data security risks” to access your system and install whatever they want for “data security risks”. NCR does this remotely and at scale with their Command Center tool.

…You acknowledge and agree that NCR may use its Command Center product (or a successor product) in order to access Your system, and You agree that NCR may load such product(s) and keep them updated on Your system as needed. 

Again, NCR gives themselves the rights to “load such products” as they deem fit to “access your system”.

NCR may gather statistical information about Your sites including, without limitation, hardware information, software versions and feature usage, and use such information for valid business purposes such as product analysis and billing information.  Additionally, NCR and/or its authorized resellers may access configuration and operational data in connection with providing support services.  NCR may use and disclose transactional and system configuration information in the form of anonymous, aggregate usage statistics that NCR derives from Your locations via Your use of the Software, but only in forms that do not reveal Your identity or Your confidential information…

This is the coup de gras. NCR is allowed to collect merchant transactional data and do what they want with it so long as it’s not identifiable to a merchant location. And when merchants use a NCR Hosted Solution NCR only doubles down on these transactional data rights in the Hosted Solutions EULA. We have to image Aloha Essentials (which is anything but essential) does the same.

Now we want to be sure we’re super clear here.

We are in no way opposed to POS companies collecting their customers’ transaction data. In fact POS companies should be collecting transaction data so they can build partnerships and develop great products from the data.

What we’re against, however, are POS companies collecting their customers’ transaction data and doing nothing with it except monetizing it for their own benefit; NCR has been selling Aloha POS data to Nielsen for years, and what upside has that brought the end customer? A POS product over a decade behind market competition, overpriced and clunky integrations, and otherwise antiquated products that NCR still has the balls to charge for? That’s how we, and many of NCR’s own customers, matter-of-factly see it.

But this is where NCR’s dealers need to see the opportunity.

NCR’s EULAs appear to be giving dealers the rights to remotely collect the transaction data. From this data dealers can structure partnerships to build novel products that bring their customers value. Dealers can even store the data so when a customer moves POS systems (absent material overhauls Aloha will be defacto dead before long) the dealer can port over the historical data – this is critical for all sorts of analysis the business should be doing (monitoring theft, scheduling employees, reviewing item velocity and pricing, marketing performance measurement, loyalty, etc.).

Okay, this is making sense. What are the costs before I consider this more fully?

Well, fortunately for you data storage costs are only getting cheaper. The average Aloha merchant puts out 25MB of data per day in the grind files. Over a year that’s 9.125GB of data. Let’s assume the average merchant has 5 years of data, or 46GB that you need to store. We’ll also assume you have 1,000 customers, which means that 46GB becomes 46TB of data.

Using AWS S3 pricing, the cost to store a GB of data is $0.023 per month.

For 46TB this cost becomes $1,058 per month.

But wait. That’s only if you need dynamic access to the data. For example, if you want to pull a report for what happened 4 and a half year ago you’d keep the data in S3. But you’re just wanting to store the data. So we should look at AWS Glacier storage options.

Per the Glacier explanations, the cost varies on how frequently you might want to access the data. If we choose the unlimited access Glacier option the monthly price falls from $1,058 per month to $183 per month, and if we choose the semi-annual Glacier access the cost falls to $47 per month.

But we’re not done compressing costs just yet!

That’s because grind files contain structured data. We can compress this data with a tool like Apache Parquet. Parquet can compress the files nearly 98%. What does this mean for our costs? It means they can be reduced by 98%, too.

Here’s a table of expected storage costs now:

So for a maximal cost of ~$250 per year (and potentially minimal cost of $12 per year) you can store your customers’ data and work with partners like WhatsBusy to turn this into material revenue streams while providing tangible ROI to your customers.

I’m sold. Now what?

The next step is to deploy the same type of local software agent that NCR, back office providers, online ordering providers, and third parties have deployed over the past two plus decades across Aloha merchants. You likely don’t have the agent, but we do, and we’ll give it to you for free. Not only that but we’ll pay for your data storage. Yep, not a typo: we’ll foot the bill for all of this.

Why?

Well, for starters, data storage is a trivial cost – the Aloha channel represented about 25% of Aloha’s installations but that number is down substantially as modern cloud POS systems eat Aloha market share and NCR eats its channel. So the active channel probably represents no more than 12,000 sites anymore, which means we’re talking about $12 per month in compressed storage costs.

Second, we have already built Aloha integration agents and it makes no sense for dealers to reinvent the wheel. If you haven’t noticed we’re proponents of a rising-tide-lifts-all-boats philosophy and this blog serves as a beacon of transparency in the interest of retail merchants. There’s no reason Aloha customers (or dealers) should suffer from NCR’s bad decision making vis-a-vis punishing integration tolls, 18-month third party integration approval timelines, and activities that we would chalk up to general malfeasance. Nor should their customers be forced to pay a third party middleware provider for moving data.

Lastly, we know what can be done with POS data better than perhaps anyone on the planet (not hyperbole) and have written about how nonsensical it was that POS companies weren’t investing trivial sums of capital in data replication to the benefit of their customers and their own bottom lines (hello Global Payments!). We feel superbly confident that we can show Aloha resellers how tangible ROI can be once a product organization like WhatsBusy has access to POS data, and by removing all costs from the equation dealers should have no reason not to pursue this.

If you want to take us up on the offer just shoot an email to jordan [at] whatsbusy.com or send him an invite on Linkedin.

If you’re thinking this is something NCR should be doing for their channel partners, you’re right. But you know, it’s NCR. Unfortunately we spend too much of our time correcting the obvious things POS companies should be doing but don’t due to sheer greed, delusion, indolence, or incompetence.