A View To a Till

SmartConnect, a maker of security solutions for POS environments, aims to help reduce such problems. SmartConnect&s Digital Vision and Restaurant Vision platforms give VARs the tools to help their POS customers keep a better eye on the behavior of employees at the register, said Henry Valentino, president and CEO of the company.

The products tie together IP surveillance cameras and POS register logs, and then synchronize the video and data streams to give managers and security auditors a single view of the actions associated with register keystrokes.

“The best way to examine an anomaly at the register is through video verification,” Valentino said. “If a guy is working out of a cash draw, and let&s say that drawer stays open for more than three minutes, or there is a successive series of no-sales that are rung up, we can sync up two or three cameras, with one hovering right over the cash drawer, so you can see exactly what&s happening.”

In business since 1998, SmartConnect cut its teeth developing surveillance software for casinos in its hometown of Las Vegas. As it expanded its technology to outfit restaurant, bar and fast-food POS environments, SmartConnect rapidly saw the opportunity to add channel partners with relationships in the hospitality market, Valentino said. In July, the vendor launched its first formal channel program, which provides margins of 15 percent to 40 percent to certified partners. Certification training is required and it is free at the vendor&s headquarters but costs about $2,500 anywhere else.

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Valentino said the channel program has helped SmartConnect reach out to a diverse variety of retail customers throughout the United States.

“We added the Partner Reseller Program because the restaurant industry is very fragmented,” Valentino said. “Burger King corporate may have 800 stores, but then another 500 independent owners will run 5,000 other stores. To reach that fragmented market, you need to have feet on the street in every major marketplace.”

For Digital South, a Charlotte, N.C.-based system integrator, SmartConnect&s products are adding 35 percent to 40 percent more revenue to its bottom line, said Dan Goss, owner of the company.

“What we focus on are high-volume POS environments with a lot of cash transactions, like quick-serve restaurants,” Goss said. “But SmartConnect integrates with quite a few things, anything with a digital trigger or an access control system.”

New surveillance cameras, server hardware and the billable costs associated with installation and calibration help drive the increased revenue, Goss said. Though SmartConnect software can run on a PC, Goss typically steers customers into adding a server to host the platform, because the increased bandwidth and storage capacity go a long way to improving the video quality of surveillance images, he said.

Deploying Digital Vision or Restaurant Vision in a typical POS environment has a sticker price of about $10,000. Pricing varies according to storage requirements, camera counts and other customizable variables, but most POS customers see a return on their investments in the first three to six months, Valentino said.

Bruce Phillips, president of Security Smart, a VAR in Atlanta, said the Smart- Connect products are a marked improvement over most of the surveillance systems his customers have been using. “One customer was just using a plain video recorder to watch the register, and because he didn&t have time to sit down and look at all the tapes, he had his mother at home reviewing them on her VCR,” Phillips said.

Phillips acknowledges that several of his company&s POS customers “are in denial” that employees may be shortchanging them, but most customers know they are losing some money on a daily basis. Concern about just how much money they may be losing makes SmartConnect an easy sale to this group, Phillips said.

“In POS environments where you have a lot of turnover, or people who are not directly managed all the time, SmartConnect sells itself,” Phillips said.