A Marriage Of POS & Managed Services

By The Business Solutions Network

This POS VAR is leveraging remote monitoring and management (RMM) tools to provide automated service to his retail and restaurant customers.

If you examined Lonestar POS back when it was founded in 1999, the company would look like many other POS VARs, selling primarily electronic cash registers and merchant processing. Fast forward 10 years, and the similarities begin to disappear. Sure, Lonestar POS offered POS terminals, software, receipt printers, and cash drawers, but it also had become a total solutions provider, offering networking equipment, VoIP telephone systems, and video surveillance. Then, in 2011, Josh Byers, president and CEO of the VAR, began a change that’s pretty radical for the world of retail and restaurant IT — he adopted some aspects of a managed services model. A lot has been written about this model, and to find it in the POS world is rare. What’s most interesting is why he did it and how he’s using it to help his business.

Around 2011, Byers was tinkering with the idea of remote monitoring and management (RMM) solutions to automate the service and support of his customers. RMM tools can be used to monitor the status of devices on a network, ensure patches are up to date, apply updates, and automate maintenance tasks. The point of RMM is to provide proactive preventive service to customers as opposed to the reactive rolling of trucks when something breaks.