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:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Cloud is here to stay.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Every year we’d hear bitching – especially from recalcitrant resellers – that cloud was trash, unreliable, expensive, and unworthy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Except that even the largest of laggards has made cloud POS systems their primary focus.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Heartland acquired a handful of POS systems before itself being acquired by the King of Fake Fees in Global Payments.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But honestly, does it really matter what you do when you’re only adding 500 new sites a year<\/a>?<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n NCR needs to get off that black tar heroin. <\/p>\n\n\n\n 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<\/a> as they wither to irrelevance. <\/p>\n\n\n\n NCR’s Connected Payments continues to suffer from problems that even their most ardent supporters are now conceding. <\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Until they sell the business unit, that is.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The problem is that their new cloud system is being built with pittance relative to what actual<\/em> software companies are spending to build solutions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Why would all these providers move to cloud given their hefty investments and install base on legacy systems?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Cloud is cheaper to operate.<\/strong> <\/p>\n\n\n\n Installation is much easier, fixing bugs much faster, and support more performant since issues can be diagnosed remotely.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Cloud is more lucrative<\/strong>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n 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<\/a>).<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\nHeartland<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
NCR<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
Shift4<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
Oracle Micros<\/h4>\n\n\n\n