The Marketing Technology Blog

It’s not often that an opportunity comes like this - a chance to win $250,000 and work with a company like Cisco to make your idea become a reality!

Before you read on, we could use your support. Though our application has made it to the Finals, we’re looking pretty light on votes. If voting is still open, we’d appreciate if you would register and vote for us:

1. Register for Cisco’s I-Prize Web Site
2. Login and click “Promote” on The SaaS POS idea.

What is the I-Prize?

Click through for the Cisco I-Prize video

I’ve been working in the Restaurant industry long enough now to realize that one of the major issues Restaurateurs deal with is the ability to find and adopt technologies easily and inexpensively. Truth be told, the industry is antiquated… Point of Sales systems will cost more than 10% of a companies startup costs and the capabilities of the systems are severely limited.

The company I currently work for has been a leader in integrating Online Ordering with POS systems. It’s an incredible challenge, though. POS systems are, at minimum, a decade behind in technology and fully unprepared for ecommerce via the web. Instead of opening up their systems to online integration, POS companies are now requiring additional license costs with unreliable and incomplete features, causing a real headache for companies like me as well as the restaurateur.

While Office applications, Email Applications and Customer Relationship Management systems have moved to Software as a Service, POS systems have not been and it’s a prime opportunity now that more companies are taking the plunge in adopting hosted solutions. With that in mind, I posted my idea on Cisco’s website, the SaaS POS. The idea is to take the current POS software and run it from the Internet rather than from the POS hardware.

The advantages are many - integration with Online Ordering becomes seamless. As well, new opportunities arise, like payroll, banking, email marketing integration, mobile integration, even product supplies (running out of salmon produces an alert asking the manager to order more. He approves and the order is sent electronically).

Cisco has really provided us with an incredible opportunity here and I’d love to see the idea come to fruition. I don’t believe there’s a more suitable company to help develop and introduce an idea like this to the market. The network infrastructure required, the security, the thin client technology… these are all strengths of Cisco!

Keep an eye on Cisco I-Prize’s Blog for additional details.

And don’t forget to promote our idea!!! The team consists of myself, Bill Dawson, Carla Ybarra-Dawson and Jason Carr.