News

Virtual POS discussion turns lively

June 20, 2011

In a recent presentation at RIS News Retail Technology Conference in Orlando, Fla., Ken Morris from Boston Retail Partners spoke to a standing room only crowd about the Virtual POS model. Virtual POS replaces traditional dedicated point-of-sale hardware and software with any PC connected to the Internet and moves transaction processing “in the cloud.”

According to RIS News, the presentation sparked a lively debate among attendees who included both proponents of virtualized transaction processing as well as “traditionalists.”

“Virtual POS is one of the most interesting and polarizing discussions we've had at the Retail Technology Conference,” said Dave Weinand, publisher of RIS News. “But there is no doubt that the concept is beginning to shake up how the retail industry addresses the point-of-sale.”

In his presentation, Morris noted that the current distributed POS model was developed to compensate for the old telecommunications networks, which were slower and unreliable. He argued that today’s communications infrastructure allows for new networked POS systems that are far more reliable and resilient.