The problem with cloud-only at the counter
A point of sale that has to reach a server in another country to complete a sale is a point of sale that stops during an outage. For a supermarket at peak, or a hotel front desk at check-in time, that is not an inconvenience — it is lost revenue and a queue of unhappy customers. It is also not a problem unique to emerging markets: rural connectivity, building works and provider outages take tills offline everywhere.
Run it on your own network
BusinessSensor is available as an installed system running against a database on your own premises. Tills, the front desk and the back office all talk to a server in the building, over your own local network. An internet outage affects your email, not your ability to trade.
- Sales, check-ins and stock movements complete locally
- Receipt printing and cash drawers driven from the workstation
- No dependency on a remote service to finish a transaction
Cloud when you want it, local when you need it
This is not an argument against the cloud. BusinessSensor also runs as a hosted service, and the two can work together — local operation for the tills and front desk, with cloud dashboards for owners who want to see the business from elsewhere.
Data sovereignty, as a side effect
Running on your own premises also answers a question that procurement increasingly asks: where does the data physically live? With an installed deployment, it lives on your hardware, in your jurisdiction, which is a straightforward answer to give a regulator or a client.