Rent-a-Center CIO Opts for All-Wireless Store Systems - ' Ensuring a Smooth ' (
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Secondly, his primary POS vendor—High Touch—has already ported its software to Linux, which would a transition to Linux an easy move were SCO to go away. “Other than a period for switching it over, we’re really not at risk,” Fuller said. “I would have time to swap it off.”
The stores currently have a separate credit card authorization system, which is not part of their current POS operation and is an older-style dial-up terminal.
“That’s old technology now. We recognize that, at some point, we will need to integrate our credit card processing inside our Point of Sale system,” he said. “There is some duplication of time and money.”
But he added that while Rent-A-Center is waiting to modernize its credit-card systems, the rest of the industry will endure the pain of finding and fixing the many security holes. “There are some benefits to lagging behind,” he said.
Today, the network features mostly DSL connections to a Cisco VPN, with some cable modems and some point-to-point Frame over a private network, but Fuller’s plan has all connections moving to MPLS circuits within 3 to 4 years, in time for full deployment of Voice-over-IP.
In about 24 locations where DSL wasn’t an option, the company used cable modems, but they wanted to limit cable modem use because “we tried to limit the number of providers that we use and that number would have grown quite exponentially had we gone for more cable,” Fuller said.
Even though the Frame sites cost a lot more than those riding the public Internet, for sites where neither cable nor DSL were options, that was their backup. His team evaluated satellites, but concluded that satellites still had too much latency and there were real estate problems. Many Rent-A-Center stores are located in strip malls and lease provisions made the installation of a roof-based satellite awkward, he said.
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Arvind Bhatia, who is a financial analyst who tracks the company for Southwest Securities, said that Rent-A-Center uses its technology well. Bhatia particularly likes how the CIO is involved in business decisions that, in other companies, would not have involved the IT department.
“If you look at how quickly they integrate the acquisitions they make, it makes sense to include those senior IT people,” Bhatia said. “That speaks to how quickly they integrate their IT systems, too.”
Kathy Mast, an IT consultant who has worked with Rent-A-Center, applauds the company for taking cost-effective approaches to technology, typically well ahead of other retailers.
For years now, for example, the chain has posted full financial specifics at the store level—within a couple of days of a financial period’s close—to all managers via its intranet. “The ability to run a financial report in a centralized location and have it be distributed for some 3,000 individual stores” is impressive, Mast said.
She also cites the company’s using its intranet to capture employee time-reporting through logons, allowing for the elimination of the older timestamp devices.
Retail Center Editor Evan Schuman can be reached at Evan_Schuman@ziffdavis.com.
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