Nearly 12 years after the launch of Square, the restaurant POS industry is finally ready to admit what we’ve been saying for 10 of them:
Cloud is here to stay.
Every year we’d hear bitching – especially from recalcitrant resellers – that cloud was trash, unreliable, expensive, and unworthy.
Except that even the largest of laggards has made cloud POS systems their primary focus.
To show how far the industry has come – if begrudgingly – let’s look at the legacy entities that had the largest POS market share and dissect their current situations.
Heartland
Heartland acquired a handful of POS systems before itself being acquired by the King of Fake Fees in Global Payments.
The systems that Heartland acquired – Dinerware, Digital Dining, PC America, Xpient/Sicom – aren’t getting any love as Global has tried (and failed by any reasonable measure) to make Xenial the go-forward cloud solution.
Recognizing their inability to ship anything that’s not a fake fee, Global acquired Mobilebytes POS, probably to acquiesce their 250+ dealers who were (and still are) getting killed by Toast.
As we hear it from those on the inside, the legacy systems Global acquired are getting no attention, and the pace of updates on Xenial and Mobilebytes is near nonexistent.
But honestly, does it really matter what you do when you’re only adding 500 new sites a year?
If there can be any metric that points to the decline of the reseller channel and payments-owned software, that’s the number to look at.
NCR
While we attended the Restaurant Leadership Conference in December, someone told us that NCR was hiring over 100 sales reps with plans to convert half their Aloha installations to Silver.
NCR needs to get off that black tar heroin.
We’ve personally moved large NCR Aloha accounts onto non-NCR payments, so we have zero confidence NCR can execute anything except unsubstantiated pay raises for management as they wither to irrelevance.
NCR’s Connected Payments continues to suffer from problems that even their most ardent supporters are now conceding.
But the takeaway that matters is that NCR is giving up on Aloha and moving to a relatively new cloud build. Aloha is too messy, bloated, and costly to maintain, so Silver is their path forward to power popcorn stands everywhere.
Until they sell the business unit, that is.
Shift4
Shift4 also bought POS assets Future, POSitouch, and Restaurant Manager to attach payments. And like Global, they seem to be running those assets straight into the ground, stripping out all R&D to focus on a new cloud system.
The problem is that their new cloud system is being built with pittance relative to what actual software companies are spending to build solutions.
But at least Shift4’s move bolsters the idea that legacy systems are being put out to pasture with a forward focus on cloud-only solutions.
Oracle Micros
Lastly, Micros RES 3700 has reached end of sale and is no longer being offered as all efforts shift to Simphony, Oracle’s cloud replacement for RES.
Oracle is still offering support for RES systems, so it’s not exactly fair to call RES end of life, but again, it’s a concerted effort to bring every merchant into a modern operating environment.
Why would all these providers move to cloud given their hefty investments and install base on legacy systems?
Cloud is cheaper to operate.
Installation is much easier, fixing bugs much faster, and support more performant since issues can be diagnosed remotely.
Cloud is more lucrative.
Cloud is often sold in a recurring license, and investors much prefer recurring revenue to the lumpy business models of legacy POS (but don’t let NCR tell you that you should have to pay a recurring fee for their shitty legacy products).
It’s nice to finally see something that anyone with an IQ over 85 would call common sense take hold. It just took 12 years too long.
Question for the author: I had thought that NCR wasn’t pushing Silver and that it has sort of faded away. Am I wrong about that?
Silver is their go-forward restaurant POS from what we’ve been told