Meet technocrat and restaurateur Ashish Tulsian, founder of POSist technologies Pvt. Ltd, India’s first and largest cloud based POS software for restaurant management.
Ashish kick-started his career founding a telecom company, serving all major telecom operators in India for value added services. A side investment in a restaurant out of passion made him realize the troubles of managing a restaurant.
He hunted for an IT solution which could help him automate and remotely manage most part of it.
Ashish feels that the role of IT in restaurant industry is quite underrated, but firmly believes that it can impact restaurant business in unimaginable ways.
With POSist he aspires to revolutionize the way restaurants function.
Here he talks exclusively to www.corecommunique.com about POSist, his vision and the way forward. Excerpts:
Q1- Tell us about the idea behind POSist?
AT -While running my telecom VAS Company I decided to invest in a restaurant with a friend, as my love for food and entrepreneurship could not have come together in a better way than running a restaurant. While it turned out to be financially rewarding, it was an uphill task with respect to managing operations. It was that time when I started my search for software which could help us manage most part of a restaurant remotely. To our surprise we didn’t find a competent application and that’s when we decided to build our own software. It spread as news amongst the other restaurant owners, and we started getting business enquiries to sell the same software to others. And so POSist was born!
Q2- In 2012, POSist was India’s first and only cloud based POS software for restaurant management. So was it rewarding to have a start-up in this domain or difficult due to lack of any similar software?
AT– Well we are still India’s first and largest Cloud based Restaurant management platform with over 2000+ restaurant clients in India and world-wide.
Having first mover advantage is a double-edged sword. While you have the advantage of learning first from the market and improving, you also have this uphill task of educating the market about your product, technology, and justifying its merits and hence pricing. Validation takes time but it’s all worth at the end.
It’s only now we are witnessing some action in this space and can see some new age POS providers coming out building me-too products but we don’t see them as competition but rather we feel they will help us educate market faster. And at the end best product will win.
Q3- Many POS service providers claim that they are Cloud based, but then why are heavy hardware installations required?
AT– This is what our sales team is encountering day in and day out. “Cloud based software” is a misnomer which can be used based on different interpretation. What it actually implies is that the major part or entire application resides on a cloud server infrastructure and is being used via internet on the client side.
Now a lot of companies are marketing their application as cloud based while in reality they are still installation based applications which send data at the end of the day to a server from which the client can access his reports remotely. But their applications still remain old technology based and require heavier hardware to support, running the hardware costs up for their clients unnecessarily.
Earlier all legacy POS providers were oblivious of our success in market and thought that cloud based application would not sell in restaurants. But as soon as they realized its working, they started marketing themselves as cloud based. Any genuine cloud based app will not require heavy & expensive hardware to run on.
Q4- If the data is on the cloud, doesn’t it affect the restaurant owners?
AT– Concerns come up in some cases but largely customers understand that none of their daily business data nowadays stay in their computers, rather it is stored online. We explain to them how banking with ICICI or HDFC or any other bank is largely banking on the cloud. And then we show them we use the best and secure cloud infrastructure with encryption at transaction points so that their data remains safe.
Q5- There are various similar international POS services providing platforms entering India. Does that affect the Indian market?
AT – Yes, it will affect the Indian market in a big way. It will not only accelerate the knowhow but will also create acceptance for new age technology products in SMBs/SMEs at large. I think we have interesting times ahead.
Q6- Now the big question: where is the POS industry headed in the future?
AT– Call me biased, but the future for POS industry looks extremely bright as adoption of technology is percolating from large enterprises to small retailers to mom-pop shops. Building as well as delivering technology solutions is cheaper and costs get reduced further down.
I see POS at the heart of all transactions taking place. It will be the glue which will hold order taking, billing, loyalty program, payment gateways, CRM etc together. That’s the reason we call POSist a Platform and not just a POS anymore.
For More Information Visit : www.posist.com