Serving up the Cloud to restaurants around the world

Belgian start-up POSIOS launched in 2012 with an innovative point of sale (POS) solution and the ambition to become the world's top POS app for the hospitality industry - specifically restaurants.

In just two years, the company has grown from a local team of three to an international business with 23 employees and more than 700 customers worldwide.

That rapid expansion caught the eye of Canada's Lightspeed, the global leader in retail POS solutions. In the summer of 2014, Lightspeed acquired POSIOS (now Lightspeed Restaurant), massively expanding the Belgian solution's international reach.

Requirements

Today, restaurants need more systems than they used to - for online reservations, ordering, customer relationship management, the whole range. Traditional POS solutions don't address these functions and are expensive and not so agile. You need PCs, a fixed network, and you need to train users. We saw the opportunity to bring restaurant technology into the connected world.

In Belgium and other European countries, there is also a big regulatory driver for restaurants to mature their IT systems, whereby every restaurant in Belgium has to connect their cash registers to locked server - a "black box". Without this "black box", you can't run a restaurant in the country. This is where we come into play.

Benefits

Mobility and flexibility in integrating systems - Using iPads and iPhones to connect every functional area of a restaurant - bar, kitchen staff, waiters, and cash - as well as other aspects of the business, like loyalty programmes. All this is connected through the cloud, which has two advantages:

It doesn't require restaurants to invest in a lot of expensive equipment. This is the disruptive part of the model. Instead of spending €500 on IT gear, restaurateurs can buy a couple of iPads and subscribe to a complete POS solution for €50 a month.

It gives owners more visibility into their businesses. They can be offsite or halfway around the world, and log in and find out how their restaurant's night went.

Customers also benefit from more information about the choices they are making - ingredient lists, nutritional facts and the like by augmenting the information on the devices.

Source: iMinds, Insights, www.iminds.be