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Major Retailer Chooses Linux for its Tills
An anonymous reader writes "ZDNet is running an article on how Matalan has installed several thousand point of sale terminals running Linux rather than Windows. The reason? Reduced cost of ownership. It was a big consultancy that did the work, Capgemini, and IBM on the kit side. Sounds like some people can get Linux to work in an 'enterprise environment' after all."
Okay, maybe I'm a technological ignoramus, but when the guy in the article talks about IBM being able "to connect onto the till remotely and go onto the BIOS" I am a bit puzzled.
Is this possible with a normal PC motherboard? Or are they using some different type of system which provides hooks for the OS to do this?
I really think POS is an important step for Linux acceptance. The beauty of Linux, of corse, is that it can run on an AS/400 or a wristwatch; and everything inbetween. I cringe when I see POS machines just running a terminal within Windows; think of what they are paying just to have telnet to a main system! While I, and most good geeks, run nothing but Linux for desktops, it'll take time to get them past the exec level; but for POS it's all about the bottom line, and no one will be able to beat Linux in that field. I think that will be the tipping point, but feel it's still ~3 years off.
fak3r.com
Obviously these people have never read those MSFT funded TCO studies or they would never have let that commie OS through the door.
I'll bet they have, they actually wrote one of those studies
From TFA:
Menzel defended this study, saying that Capgemini provides an independent view, but admitted "sometimes there are situations where you get together with the client and defend their data."
Yeah, sure. Those "situations" would be when "the client" gives you a lot of "their money".
Very objective consultancy.
Since everybody else is posting the os's of POS systems and there backends, I can't think of a more appropriate place to post the ones I know of(which is only one for myself).
s eStudy.asp?CaseStudyID=17131
RadioShack:
POS: Windows XP Embedded
Backend: SCO Unix (I believe its version 5, I might be mistaken).
In fact Microsoft has posted a story on how RadioShack supposedly saved millions of dollars by using windows. I can say personally that is far from the case and Linux would of been the better choice.
http://www.microsoft.com/resources/casestudies/Ca
Insert Witty Remark Here ===>____________________________
I hear on the grapevine that their system now runs on most of the Unix-alikes: SCO, Linux, FreeBSD, etc.
What you might be missing is the backend that these systems integrate with. The deployment and management infrastructure in place. No it isn't the kind of massive backend type enterprise deployments you like to hear about, but it is still a good win for Linux. If Linux performs well on all of the tills it makes it easier for that company to integrate more Linux boxes everywhere.
Jeremy
Go to Lowes and you'll see a KDE based desktop.
I work for a small retailer, and we use windows running the Wasp POS system. It comes with a cash drawer, bar code scanner, and recipt printer. Our owner, as well as me, would love to switch to Linux (like to try tuxPOS), but we have no idea if the hardware would work with little puttsing with it, as we can afford NO downtime.
On a side note, our system just crashed last week, and with it, our admiration for windows waxes.
Speaking from the perspective of someone who worked at an acme two summers ago back in high school I can tell you that this is a blessing. Most people will tell you dos is stable, most people who have worked on dos extensively will tell you this, most people who will tell you this havn't really used dos for anything more than reformatting in the last 7 years. We ran dos on all of our machines our software booted up on top of that, despite generally working at nights I got to see this event daily because our systems went down at least once a week. We never had a day where a single system didn't go down. Sometimes we'd be totally down for half an hour while our server spit fire. I got my hands on one of these machines once because the manager was fed up because he couldn't get it to reconnect to the server, in linux all I would have had to do was redefine the ethernet card, in dos I sat there for an hour and a half and cursed and screamed and kicked the thing because there was rather simply no way to do this, the system said it wasn't there, the bios said it was, we couldn't even try reinstalling the drivers if we had them cause the thing didn't have any sort of disk drive.
I'm no windows hater, I like games those require windows. But anyone running an office app, server, or POS with/on windows should be shot.
I used to work at a supermarket during high school. They had OS2/Warp on all the registers operated by the cashires. Then they had a couple self-scan registers which were running Windows 2000. The self-scan's would crash daily while the manual's would never go down except when the power went out (which happened a couple of times during the year and a half that I worked there). OS2/Warp is just about dead these days, so its good to know IBM is still carrying on in the POS (Point of Sale) business with a quality OS.
The other day I went into a different supermarket and saw a cash register which had the message "Powered by Microsoft Windows NT" on the bottom of the screen. It made me cringe.
I've seen quite a few registers run xenix, even fairly recently. It was kind of funny, the POS software must've crashed or there was a hardware fault or something, because the poor machine would keep trying to reboot, proudly displaying something like "SCO Xenix copyright 1987" every time. Needless to say that their machines were ancient, probably the original 386's, but it was entertaining, nonetheless.
Constitutional rights may be respected, repealed, or modified; but they must never be ignored.
Huh. Back in '86-'88 I worked at the Pizza Hut COTS in Largo, Fl. Local Backend was SysV and about 80 terminals. Connected via multiple trunks to dial-up POS running SCO in 3 counties' worth of delivery joints.
Wait, What?
Of course I could be totally wrong about this, but from everyone I talked to while working there, I gathered that this was pretty much the norm.
When were you last involved with a POS implementation at a retailer? Cause I did one a couple years ago, for a retailer, and the in-store systems that the client was putting in place were fairly complicated. The actual POS terminal itself is a fairly minor part of the whole in-store system. The work for things like inventory tracking and restocking (from suppliers), EOD and realtime sales numbers, even time card and other HR type functionality, is usually done on back office servers. Sadly, the article was thin on details about the particular system that was implemented, so the argument is largely speculative at the moment, but to say that POS systems aren't "enterprise" is just not true, particularly if the business sells product for a living.
Our POS terminals ran on DOS. Yep, good old DOS 6.22. It was ultra-stable, had low hardware requirements, and was pretty fast. The eye candy wasn't quite as nice, but as a cashier I just needed information shown to me. Eye candy would've been a distraction.
I'd personally like to see studies on uptime of various POS terminals so we can actually quantify reliability of one OS over another.
The POS systems in the convenience store where I work runs Win2K (NCR machines running Retalix storepoint if anybody cares). Anyways, they use touchscreens which suck, but because of this they assume you won't have a keyboard hooked up to it. One night I grabbed a keyboard from one of the systems in the backroom and was able to do a quick Winkey+D to get to the desktop and have some fun, looking around all the systems on the network, figuring out how it all works together, playing minesweeper, etc.
Our Retalix system is a piece of shit, by the way, there are all kinds of bugs in it, mostly just annoyances, but a few of them are pretty bad (i.e. potentially allowing an employee to steal cash). However, I don't know how much of this is my company sucking and how much of this is Retalix though.
Anyways, the program would often crash. When I would work, I would be the only employee there (I knew how to run the place myself, and they took advantage of that). My manager (a very bad one...1 week after I quit, she got fired), took upwards of 2 hours to reach at times...and then a 10-minute drive...so the machine would be out of order for 2 hours, at times.
Funny thing is...I'd still sell things. I'd keep track of everything (with pen and paper) I sold, and did all the math in my head... I had a key to the register, so I'd leave it open... never came up more than 10 cents off.
Earn a % of cash back from Newegg, Tiger Direct, Walmart.com, and more: http://www.mrrebates.com?refid=458505
apparently, most airports use a windows box for each and every display (such as the ones showing the flight number at the gates). those seem to regularly crash, with nice BSODs that makes the airport look dumb. see for instance LAS (Las Vegas McCarran).
I am a manager for a movie theatre company which uses Windows 2000 box office and concessions POS terminals. The software running on those terminals connects with an Access database served on a Windows 2000 Server box. The machines themselves are reliable, with uptimes measured in weeks or months. (Of course, such uptimes mean the machines aren't being patched regularly, but they don't give me the admin password ;) ). If I weren't such a Unix junkie, I wouldn't hesitate to recommend such a setup as a point of sale solution for a company that was unwilling to train Unix personnel to support the setup.
:)
However, the software running on the terminals is HORRIBLE. I have never encountered such sub-par coding and attention to detail in my life. For example, on our box office stations, if a customer decides to purchase tickets on a credit card and swipes the card through the reader before the cashier has a chance to push the Pay -> Credit button sequence, the application rings the sale up as a cash sale, then promptly crashes. Huh? The average student in an intro CS course can write better VB than these clowns.
At any rate, because of the sheer shoddiness of the software, we have enormous support costs. Managers who know their way around computers (me) are forever restarting the POS application or troubleshooting some issue or another. When we tech-savvy managers aren't around, the mere mortals are forced to ring up transactions for the rest of the evening using calculators and paper records until one of us or an IT guy can come in. (The IT guys, by the way, are based over a hundred miles away.)
Because of the poor quality of the software, our current Windows solution is not cost-effective. However, if these clowns wrote a Unix-based POS application, our TCO would still be high simply because we are always having people support the application as opposed to the platform. That isn't to say I wouldn't be thrilled if we ditched the software and moved to Linux...or even better, OpenBSD (cue the Netcraft spam).
By the way, if you are in the IT department of a large movie theatre corporation and you are considering a POS solution, don't touch Splyce with a ten-foot pole.
$ whatis themeaningoflife
themeaningoflife: not found
Damn, I hate to come in so late on a POS discussion. Linux POS is my specialty; I've been writing POS software since 1977. Even here in my home I can touch an icon on my touchscreen X terminal display and open a remote graphic to any of my customers' sites. With a couple of touches I can order a beer in Texas, a pizza in Florida or a burrito in California. I can put a wireless touchscreen X terminal display in your hand or build one into a restaurant table table that will let a customer do the same thing - enter & pay for their own order. POS has come a long way. What's ahead will be even better.
I develop POS (point of sale) software for a living. The target platform is NT4, and we have thousands of installations, and great stability. My only point here is: This is NOT an OS (linux/win32) issue, but much more a POS-software issue.