Pigeonholed By Your Platform?

Written by Matt Pillar, Editor In Chief

This fall found me out on the road quite a bit, visiting retail technology vendors and executives from some of the companies we've covered in Integrated Solutions For Retailers this year. Case in point, I had a chance to drop in on 360Commerce's user conference while in Austin, TX a couple of months back. There, KB Toys' VP of IT Keith Porter and Circuit City's Manager of Store Architecture David Dorf were among the retail representatives presenting on a panel moderated by a man who wears many hats — Jerry Rightmer is software vendor 360Commerce's senior vice president, CTO, and founder.

The presenters discussed their experiences running JavaPOS-based software on three different operating systems (4690, Linux, and Windows XP Embedded) in widely varying hardware configurations, database environments, and network scenarios ranging from DSL (digital subscriber line) to frame relay to 28K dial-up.

JavaPOS Lauded For Flexibility, Control
As one might expect, the panelists had good things to say about the software's platform-agnostic characteristics. Our hosts wouldn't have invited them otherwise. But I was most impressed by their descriptions of the technology deployment enabled by Java at the store level. Dorf described the software's flexible application across hardware platforms that, at Circuit City, are increasingly migrating from traditional POS stations to a combination of cash registers and browser-based kiosks. KB's Porter also lauded the software's Internet portability in his more than 1,250 stores, echoing comments by all panelists that Web deployment at the store level was easily facilitated by Java.

None of the panelists were afraid to address the baggage of increased hardware costs that comes with a Java upgrade, either. But for the most part, they agreed that while Java requires more processing speed and memory to run, the cost of upgrading to Java is justified by the application flexibility gained. In fact, Dorf says he expects support costs to decrease as the software helps drive platform standardization across Circuit City's more than 600 stores.