About nine months ago, we had a large point of sale system installed at the store. Bit of a learning curve but it is proving to be a great investment on the back end - we can now get a really good idea of what is selling and what is not. Plus, being able to scan items in instead of having to price everything as we stock it saves a lot of time - that plus we had people move price tags around on bottles of wine - save a few bucks and rip us off.
One of the systems I seriously considered was Micros - the cost per lane was a lot higher and it didn't do as much so I passed on it. Plus, not a big fan of their owner Oracle. I have dealt with Oracle databases both at Microsoft and at the Ocean Engineering company I used to work for. The performance is superb but the administrator interface is unnecessarily byzantine and convoluted. Poor design.
Very glad I did not choose them - just saw this in the news - from Krebs on Security:
Data Breach At Oracle’s MICROS Point-of-Sale Division
A Russian organized cybercrime group known for hacking into banks and retailers appears to have breached hundreds of computer systems at software giant Oracle Corp., KrebsOnSecurity has learned. More alarmingly, the attackers have compromised a customer support portal for companies using Oracle’s MICROS point-of-sale credit card payment systems.
Asked this weekend for comment on rumors of a large data breach potentially affecting customers of its retail division, Oracle acknowledged that it had “detected and addressed malicious code in certain legacy MICROS systems.” It also said that it is asking all MICROS customers to reset their passwords for the MICROS online support portal.
MICROS is among the top three point-of-sale vendors globally. Oracle’s MICROS division sells point-of-sale systems used at more than 330,000 cash registers worldwide. When Oracle bought MICROS in 2014, the company said MICROS’s systems were deployed at some 200,000+ food and beverage outlets, 100,000+ retail sites, and more than 30,000 hotels.
The size and scope of the break-in is still being investigated, and it remains unclear when the attackers first gained access to Oracle’s systems. Sources close to the investigation say Oracle first considered the breach to be limited to a small number of computers and servers at the company’s retail division. That source said that soon after Oracle pushed new security tools to systems in the affected network investigators realized the intrusion impacted more than 700 infected systems.
Ouch - that is going to put a big dent into their sales. They deal mostly with large corporations - over 330,000 sites deployed over 180 countries. Clients include Starbucks, Ben and Jerry's, Burger King, Sonic, star.wood hotels, Hilton and Marriott, IKEA, adidas, Tractor Supply (yikes - I shop there regularly) and Sony.
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