Netopia and Precidia Team to Offer POS Solution

Netopia and Precidia will work together to offer retailers an efficient and cost-saving Point-of-Sale (POS) solution. Retailers today use slow dial-up lines, costly frame relay or dedicated circuit lines to connect remote POS terminals to credit card processing centers and the retailers corporate headquarters. Many retailers are migrating to broadband for POS applications to avoid the expense of frame relay and dedicated circuit lines as well as the poor performance of dial-up service. In the past, such a migration required retailers to replace all their existing POS terminals. Netopias netOctopus(R) POS Manager, broadband routers and Precidias POSConnect Products, the EtherDial and Ether232Plus, allow retailers to migrate to IP, without replacing their terminals, at a significant cost savings. When retailers want to migrate to broadband, they need only connect their existing terminals to the Precidia EtherDial instead of the modem or Frame Relay line. Precidias device accepts the data from the existing terminal and converts it to Internet Protocol (IP) traffic. The IP traffic is sent to Netopias router, supporting secure VPNs and a managed firewall. Both the Precidia EtherDial and the Netopia router are managed by the netOctopus POS Manager. By using the combination of Netopia and Precidia products, retailers can migrate to a secure broadband connection to increase transaction speeds--reducing the time required to execute transactions from approximately 30 seconds to less than a few seconds--and eliminate the need to retrofit their existing POS devices. The netOctopus POS Manager can manage new and existing hardware with simple commands by a network administrator at a single, central location. One management system can manage the Netopia broadband equipment, secure VPN connections, security, and the Precidia device, enabling simplified installations and ongoing maintenance of highly distributed retail chains.