oracle retail hardware

Software giant Oracle has made its first move into in-store retail hardware, unveiling a new PoS for an omnichannel world at the NRF Big Show in New York.

Aimed at the retail and hospitality industry, a version running software for grocery stores is currently at soft launch.

The system is cloud-based and fully integrated with a comprehensive suite of Oracle software allowing retailers to streamline inventory, fulfilment and planning by ensuring merchandising and store solutions share the same hierarchy, tag and label information, inventory and transaction and price management information.

“In a traditional grocery store I would see it at a traditional checkout lane or at counters, or in smaller stores like a deli or pop-up,” said Oracle director of hardware strategy John Nicewick.

“There are two versions. One is a fixed PoS we call the Oracle workstation and the other is a detachable tablet that can be used for line-busting [completing transactions away from a traditional register] or customer engagement.”

Oracle’s acquisition of hardware specialist Micros in September 2014 promoted the move. “Micros was a hardware leader for 25 years so this offered us the opportunity to extend our portfolio to suit retailers,” added Nicewick. “They had 30 years of experience supplying reliable service screens where bored teenagers working in fast food could spill milkshake all over it and it would still be fine. That’s now matched with Oracle’s back-end expertise so it’s the hardware and the software together. Then we add cloud functionality and wrap a support umbrella around that. And we believe we are the only top-tier supplier to be able to deliver all that.”

Oracle solution market director Corey Gale said the PoS had been “toughened up” for the retail environment - it was entirely resistant to dust and spillages because it was “solid state” with no moving parts.”I worked in grocery for a long time and checkouts were always breaking down or constantly rebooting thanks to dust or spillages,” he said. “That can’t happen with this because it’s all solid state. There are no moving parts, so it just doesn’t break. And people are promiscuous in the grocery space so the better experience retailers can offer customers, the better.”