Sales software provider switches to Azure, offers new reporting solution for customers

Data to power business customers 

From tiny startups to large corporations, Epos Now’s customers around the world all run on the same thing—data. When Epos Now started in 2011, it wanted to ensure that its customers had access to cloud computing capabilities and modern technology to power their businesses. As a global business, Epos Now provides cloud-based point-of-sale (POS) solutions to customers that span multiple vertical markets, with a key focus on hospitality and general and specialized retail. 

Epos Now recently decided to enhance its customers’ reporting capabilities by providing a solution flexible enough to meet the needs of its wide range of customers. The company wanted to deliver a scalable data as a service offering to give merchants more control over their data, a richer level of reporting, and better data visualization to make more informed business decisions. 

Data migration for robust analytics

Epos Now ran Microsoft SQL Server on Amazon Web Services (AWS) Relational Database Service for transactional and analytical workloads. To be able to offer the new service it wanted to offer, Epos Now needed to optimize the SQL Server capabilities, including connecting the data more easily and improving scalability. So Epos Now evaluated a move from AWS to Microsoft Azure. During mid-2018, Epos Now decided to migrate its data to Azure SQL Database and to work with the Microsoft FastTrack for Azure team to help make the transformation.

The FastTrack for Azure experts provided technical guidance throughout the migration process. “We turned to the FastTrack for Azure team to help us architect, design, and complete a proof of concept for our whole deployment within Azure—they were instrumental in flattening our learning curve,” says Andrew Morris, Chief Product Officer at Epos Now. 

For the migration, Epos Now is using Azure Data Factory to extract data from SQL Server on AWS and load it into Azure Blob storage. From there, the data is loaded into staging tables within Azure SQL Database managed instance. 

“Our new ecosystem feels seamless, with a SQL Server, Azure Data Factory, and Blob storage pipeline that works absolutely beautifully with no operational issues,” says Morris. “It helped knowing we had continual support from FastTrack for Azure, where someone with the right skill set could answer our questions and help us move forward quickly.”

Fast, cost-effective SQL Server deployment

With the support of FastTrack for Azure, Epos Now experienced a fast and smooth deployment process with results that benefit all its customers. “We’ve improved performance on custom reports by a factor of three, and we know we still have more optimization that we can do,” says Josh Hart, Cloud Architect at Epos Now.

The company also expects that its move to Azure SQL Database will reduce its operating costs. “Long term, we will significantly reduce our SQL Server spend as we move workloads from AWS to Azure,” says Morris.

A differentiator that helps customers

Epos Now created a new revenue stream with its data as a service offering and will release the service to all customers in late 2019. “We built a bespoke reporting solution from the ground up in Azure and can now offer answers to our customers’ questions about tracking, key performance indicators, and geographic performance,” says Hart.

Adds Morris, “By creating this new solution in Azure, we can give our customers a best-in-breed solution that clearly differentiates us from other providers. It sets us apart because of the customizability, the flexibility, and the performance our solution offers.” 

Epos Now aims to help customers of all sizes and operating models, and its new offering benefits those with in-house data experts and BI teams as well as those without. Larger companies that have analytics solutions will have better data to work with, and smaller companies will spend less time laboring over spreadsheets. Says Morris, “Using Azure for our data solution will give tens of thousands of our customers the latest technology to save time and provide the real-time insights they need to compete and thrive.”

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