2ICT704 assignment
Design Solution for :
US-based ServeMe offers a point-of-sale (POS) app service to restaurants across Southeast Asia. The Apple iPad-based POS, for which restaurants subscribe on a monthly basis, delivers a range of restaurant services. These include table bookings, food orders, bill payments, and receipt printing. Today, ServeMe, which has 45+ employees, is the leading tablet-based POS system for restaurants in US. While many of its 2,500 customers are based in US, the company has been attracting restaurant owners in Singapore, Hong Kong, and Malaysia, with as many as 150 restaurants signing up for the ServeMe service each month.
When John founded ServeMe, he was confident of its success. He was an experienced restaurateur, who’d found it impossible to find a tablet-based POS system that he could customize for his own business needs. Convinced he was not the only one in US with this problem, he launched ServeMe in 2012 to offer restaurants a fully customizable POS system that is available on the iPad and that they could access for a monthly fee. A key part of the ServeMe business plan was the infrastructure to support the service. For example, restaurant customers would upload data about their menus and prices to the infrastructure, which in turn would enable order taking and customer invoicing. Restaurant staff would use an iPad app to interface with backend data. Kpencer, chief technology officer at ServeMe, says, “We ruled out building an on-premises infrastructure from day one. Our business plan was developed around a cloud-based solution that enabled us to deliver our product for a fee of $70 per month per restaurant. For us, it was crucial to find a cloud service that would help us keep our IT overhead down, including administration costs.” From John’s point of view, cost wasn’t the only factor to consider. “We had to be able to scale our infrastructure quickly as the POS service took off, and we had to guarantee customers high availability. Any downtime would seriously impact their businesses, especially if it occurred during traditional meal times.” On top of this, he says, the company wanted a platform on which it could integrate additional services easily. “Analytics is an exciting area for many companies. Our goal is to offer analytical services to customers for a greater insight into their operations.”