News

Cut, paste, deploy

February 14, 2005

When Transaction Management looked at ways to grow its business and still control its services, most roads led to self-service for their Pay All Bills Here solution.

"As a financial transaction management company, it's extremely important for us to maintain control over how transactions occur through our systems," said CEO Larry Scudder. "While costs have been one barrier for us, the control factor has been the greatest deterrent for us to move forward with self-service."

This story and all the great free content on Kiosk Marketplace is supported by: WebRaiser

Most existing options just would not work. Developing its own self-service device - say, a custom-made kiosk and software - would be too expensive. At the same time, attempting to piggyback on existing kiosks would entail a software compatibility nightmare that in even the best scenarios would still forfeit the control Scudder demands.

Enter what many are calling the third generation kiosk: A software solution that can reside on any Web-enabled kiosk or ATM and give the deployer complete autonomy over the front-end and backend. It is the application service provider model, or ASP for self-service.

Rent-a-kiosk

Building applications on an ASP self-service platform, rather than on a proprietary application, enables products and services to be distributed on any kiosk. Retailers using this model essentially rent e-commerce or advertising space on kiosks, giving retailers and others competitive advantage outside of their physical stores. This model leverages existing networks, hardware and service infrastructure. The kiosk becomes simply another business delivery system.

The TSS WebPay is one such platform. Recently introduced by WebRaiser Technologies, the utility is offered free to companies who have existing e-commerce or e-business sites. It includes a self-service transaction plug-in, extensive help files, example source code and a virtual kiosk that lets Web developers simulate their Web sites running as a self-service transaction system. The total package allows e-commerce Web developers to design, implement and test their applications before making investments in hardware and software. When the companies are ready to deploy, they pay a license fee based on the number of units on which the application will run.

"In our initial beta release, we provided 10 companies TSS WebPay to insert into their e-commerce/e-business solutions," said Alex Lowe, chief technology officer of WebRaiser Technologies.

"By using TSS WebPay, they were able to run an internal assessment of the readiness of their system for self-service and make the decision to see if it would be feasible to run their existing systems in a self-service environment and if so, determine what modification they would have to make. All of them were able to deliver their solutions in under four weeks with full transaction capabilities and some minor user-interface work to make the systems more user friendly."

"We have dabbled with the concept of self-service for years," said POS Payment co-founder Mark Block. "Each time we began the process, we evaluated all the costs of development and started questioning ROI. Now, we are able to embed self-service into our existing systems, modify a few graphics and have our solutions transacting on kiosks very quickly and inexpensively. Self-service is now a growing channel of new business for us."