The Cloud – The Next Frontier of Restaurant Technology
Restaurants are learning about what it means to survive in today’s tech-obsessed culture. It may have all started with putting up a simple website and menu on the Internet “just because,” but it’s quickly grown to much more than that in the last decade. Now, it’s not uncommon to see restaurants with their own Facebook pages and active Twitter accounts — complete with special deals, discounts and promotions for “checking in,” of course. And they’re becoming entrepreneurial too — reaching out with different businesses like Groupon and Living Social to entice new customers while partnering with service-based companies like Seamless and GrubHub to provide easy (and profitable) online food delivery.
And now, restaurants are turning their attention to a new service: Cloud technology.
The Cloud
The cloud — which “allows users to store data on remote computer servers and retrieve that data almost as fast as if it resided on their server at home or office” — is now being utilized within the restaurant and food industry in a big way: To store information about their customers’ spending habits.
According to QSR, restaurants are finding that the cloud can help them streamline their operations and share data more easily — as well as crunch data and information meaningfully (and more quickly). And it’s a lot cheaper too.
Take, for example, Chicago-based company Newly Weds Foods, who is using the cloud to communicate and share information and ideas instantaneously with more than their 2,000 employees all over the world. Before multiple e-mails were needed to deliver someone the necessary information, especially when dealing with large-sized files.
Wingstop, the popular chicken wings chain, has also been toying with the idea of going with the cloud and is in the middle of a three-year project to build their own cloud.
Let’s be honest — not having a website or Yelp page (unless you’re planning on being some hip new spot that no one will ever hear about) is definitely a detriment. But will not having cloud technology hurt restaurants? We’ll just have to see.
