NCR's Divergent Paths
The 116-year old POS supplier is breaking from tradition by stepping up its pursuit of the hot data warehousing market and trying to crack two very difficult markets -- self-checkout and electronic shelf labels
October 2000
By Michael Garry
Reprinted with permission from Retail Technology
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Vawdrey also sees growing momentum for electronic shelf labels (ESL's), which allow retailers to make price changes chainwide on the fly. ESL's are a technology that, like self-checkout, has been marketed by mostly small, entrepreneurial companies (Electronic Retailing Systems, Telepanel), though other large vendors -- IBM and ICL -- preceded NCR in this arena.
Though ESL's have never made much headway in retail, Vawdrey predicts that technological advances over the next nine to 12 months will result in a better price point and business model for the labels, "so the market will take off." In particular, he points to an innovation in NCR's RF-based labels that he says no other vendor's labels has: the ability to reflect a confirmation of a price change to the back-room PC without expending any of the labels battery power. The ESL system is also being designed to co-exist with other RF devises in a store, both in the United States and abroad.
By the middle of next year, Vawdrey says, these improvements will result in a price point per label less than $6 (down from $8 today), including supporting technology.
Fano is also bullish on ESL's, seeing an "incredible market potential," to the tune of "billions of dollars," Time will tell.
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