Oracle Hospitality is the successor to MICROS eCommerce software, modular software dedicated to the needs of airlines, hotels and resports, sport venues, restaurants and bars, and others.
The MICROS Point-of-Sale (PoS) systems are available and now offered by Oracle since the acquisition of MICROS Systems in 2014, and are now part of the Oracle Hospitality Suite.
Kounta is particularly well suited to small to medium sized hospitality businesses. It has a great many number of add-ons and integrations that enhance the user experience and its general usefulness from a back end perspective. For example, there is the ability to program automatic menu surcharges for certain circumstances, such as public holidays. It also handles bill-splitting well. It could possibly be less appropriate for venues that need extremely detailed sales data, or for those venues that have very complicated menus or ordering options.
In my experience, there has not been a resolution on outstanding tickets opened two years ago during the initial implementation. Simple things like time reporting, creating buttons, and marking items as "unavailable" have issues. The system has a lag when servers log out of checks that prevents them from opening the checks on another terminal without a wait that feels like an eternity in the restaurant industry and with direct impact to the guest. Good luck calling support. Most of my experience involves the person I spoke with having no idea how to fix my issue and having to "escalate the ticket." This escalation process will last weeks, months, and in our case, years with no resolution.
Support is awful. Oracle does not directly support end-users and depends on resellers to offer support. So if there is a bug or breaking change, we have to jump through hoops to get something fixed.
Does not play well with other software or interfaces. There are interfaces but they lack a serious amount of features that are crucial to our business.
The guest facing hardware does not hold up to constant use very well.
The backend hardware is lacking in PCI compliance and is not meant for enterprise use.
The software itself looks as if it is stuck in the early 2000s and there has been no sign of an update in many years.
Reporting is difficult to set up and use and you have to rely on third-party reporting to get decent usable reports.
We moved from Vend to Kounta because of Kounta's enhanced functionality for the hospitality domain. Vend was, at the time, more oriented towards the retail industry and so it lacked key features that would have allowed our business to grow and become more efficient. Over time, Kounta has continually improved and adapted to better suit its customers' needs.
We've stayed with MICROS mainly due to that's how we've always operated and to switch operating POS systems would be a HUGE learning curve for everyone involved.
Micros has allowed us to leverage our margin by using our own credit processor and loyalty program. We've seen success from both of these platforms (not Micros) and have been able to save money on the extra costs of using Micros.
