{"id":919,"date":"2018-07-12T12:14:35","date_gmt":"2018-07-12T12:14:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/reformingretail.com\/?p=919"},"modified":"2019-01-23T09:59:58","modified_gmt":"2019-01-23T15:59:58","slug":"ncrs-aloha-proves-why-pos-companies-should-never-try-to-build-everything","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/reformingretail.com\/index.php\/2018\/07\/12\/ncrs-aloha-proves-why-pos-companies-should-never-try-to-build-everything\/","title":{"rendered":"NCR&#8217;s Aloha Proves Why POS Companies Should Never Try to Build Everything"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>We've firmly held our position that point of sale (POS) has <a href=\"http:\/\/reformingretail.com\/index.php\/2016\/10\/19\/are-cloud-pos-companies-thinking-too-big\/\">traditionally been a low margin business<\/a> that takes decades to scale. Some POS software manufacturers - called ISVs - have interpreted\u00a0the torpidity of the market to mean that <em>they<\/em> should be the ones building everything on top of the POS. We've likewise said this is a fool's errand. As if the road to bolt-on hell isn't already littered with the corpses of feeble ISV bolt-ons, we found a still-breathing\u00a0example to use as a case study.<\/p><p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.ncr.com\/hospitality\/restaurant-solutions\/manage-business\/business-intelligence\">NCR Pulse<\/a> is NCR Aloha's mobile reporting tool. It grabs real-time information from the POS and puts it into a mobile application restaurant owners can use to... well, look at. With the exception of theft reporting (sold separately as <a href=\"https:\/\/www.ncr.com\/tags\/aloha-restaurant-guard\">Restaurant Guard<\/a>), none of the Pulse data is actionable. <a href=\"http:\/\/reformingretail.com\/index.php\/2017\/10\/24\/brick-mortar-merchants-time-to-raise-the-damn-bar-on-your-expectations\/\">As we've shared earlier<\/a>, this is just par for the course in a stagnating industry, so you can't be too hard on NCR.<\/p><div class=\"leaky_paywall_message_wrap\"><div id=\"leaky_paywall_message\"><a href=\"https:\/\/reformingretail.com\/index.php\/subscribe\/\">Subscribe<\/a> or <a href=\"https:\/\/reformingretail.com\/index.php\/log-in\/\">log in<\/a> to read the rest of this content.<\/div><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>We&#8217;ve firmly held our position that point of sale (POS) has traditionally been a low margin business that takes decades to scale. Some POS software manufacturers &#8211; called ISVs &#8211; have interpreted\u00a0the torpidity of the market to mean that they should be the ones building everything on top of the POS. We&#8217;ve likewise said this [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2933,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[5,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-919","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-solutions","category-pos"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p81nA2-eP","jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/reformingretail.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/07\/a1-3.png?fit=367%2C283&ssl=1","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/reformingretail.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/919","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/reformingretail.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/reformingretail.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reformingretail.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reformingretail.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=919"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/reformingretail.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/919\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4271,"href":"https:\/\/reformingretail.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/919\/revisions\/4271"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reformingretail.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2933"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/reformingretail.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=919"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reformingretail.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=919"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reformingretail.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=919"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}