The reason why Aloha has gained significant market share in America is that it was one of the first. (At this point, a food truck without a Square seems strange.) So if it isn’t complicated, what’s stopping competitors? Nothing really, Micros and Square have been competing with Aloha for years, but have carved specific niches. It’s a piece of dedicated software that manages orders, tracks sales, and even helps manage employee hours. It’s not an operating system, as many Aloha systems run Microsoft Windows. They’re basically just a touchscreen that is only used to run Aloha. Considering there are 700,000 restaurants in the US alone (which is Aloha’s primary market), their domestic market penetration is pretty impressive.īut an Aloha system doesn’t really seem all that complicated to the unfamiliar, and they really aren’t. Aloha is used by tens of thousands of restaurants and bars globally, with some industry veterans having exclusively used the system throughout their careers. Now owned by the payment processing behemoth NCR Corporation, Aloha has been an industry standard restaurant point of sale (POS) for nearly 20 years. Even with the rise of places like Chipotle and Subway where order takers often make your food on the spot, there is still a way to record the transaction for inventory and revenue purposes. Regardless of how a restaurant is set up, however, they usually need some mechanism for communicating orders with the kitchen. Order from a counter? Table service? Automated kiosk? Invite-only app that exclusively accepts bitcoin (looking at you pop-up cronut place in Williamsburg)? Processing orders is a unique element in food service as it sets the tone for the experience that people can expect. How restaurants process their orders says a lot about the establishment. It simply found a way to reliably serve a need that restaurants have. The company didn’t really do anything revolutionary.

There’s not a lot technically complicated about Aloha. (via IPS Aloha) When nothing complicated is still a Godsend This device is a bedrock technology of many restaruants, and you probably have no idea what it is.

Ibm point of sales system