Niko Papademetriou

Look, cloud is an amazing thing.

Cloud only or too heavily tied to the cloud also creates bottlenecks.

It creates over-reliance on internet access, right?

Things like latency and packet loss and bandwidth all can have significant negative or adverse impacts on systems that are too heavily tied and architected to the cloud.

And so in the restaurant space, especially in the fast casual and quick service arena that we work, if you have things like holding data back because of bandwidth issues or internet loss or things like that, that can spin out of control very quickly.

And we saw that.

My name is Nico Papadimitriou.

I'm the co-founder and executive vice president at Q. This is CodeStory.

Q is a unified commerce platform built for enterprise restaurant chains here in the U.S.

primarily.

We focus on fast casual and quick service chains.

So some of our customers are Jack in the Box and Dave's Hot Chicken, Saladworks and Luke's Lobster, just to name a few.

And today, the modern POS needs to go far beyond simply the black plastic box on the countertop.

For a long time, you used to be able to take a transaction in a restaurant or a bar with that 100-pound brass machine sitting on the back shelf.

And micros, among a small handful of other technology companies, were pioneers in coming up with more computer-based electronic point-of-sale systems.

And quite frankly, there wasn't a ton of innovation there for a few decades, between the 80s and really the early to mid-2000s.

And you started to get to the later 2000s and...

there was a proliferation of new order channels, whether it was ordering over the phone.

Sure, that's not that different, but it still creates a different workflow.

Or as you fast forward a little bit further, ordering from your laptop at work or ordering from your mobile phone as we continue to move forward, custom mobile applications.