Squirrel VS Aloha 1

[99GuinnessLover]

My Company is considering switching out Aloha for Squirrels. Mostly for the cost reasons.

As i see there are some of you who have worked for both i was hoping I could get your Opinions of the two and maybe what we Gain\Lose in switching.

 

[coorsman]

Sorry Aloha guy's but I'm still a loyal Squirrel fan all the way!

 

[TobeThor]

If you already have an Aloha POS system, how does buying another one save you money?

 

[SwampGas]

I have to agree with TobeThor..

Besides, most of my old co-workers from Squirrel are now working for Radiant.

MegabyteCoffee.com

 

[coorsman]

Hey, I was a former Squirrel employee. Maybe Aloha is that much harder to support than Squirrel. Ever notice how many support issues are on this forum alone? Aloha being DOS/Windows based - using DBF files lends itself to many faults. I have to deal with them daily. Corrupt Trans logs, incomplete grinds and EOD problems.

After Squirrel was totaly re-written in SQL (yea they had problems with the first release). it remains very stable.

Oh well, another Aloha support call more later- gotta go

 

[SwampGas]

Yeah, I know you are a former Squirrel employee also. Same as me.

I don't think Aloha is harder to support, but the fact that Aloha has a much larger customer base. Squirrels' customer base is quite small these days and not really growing. They've closed more offices than opened, and the dealer side reflecting the same. And aren't they owned by another VC now?

I will give Squirrel credit. They invented the first touchscreen POS and working for them was a blast many years ago. I still keep in touch with people from my old offices and the old Wichita office.

But looking at the posts here, I see alot of people that have no maintenance asking for help, sometimes strange advice given, -But, alot of good advice too!

Is there anyone else on this forum that is with a large company that has an install base with 300 sites or more using Aloha (Not a reseller)? Or, is there a forum for larger users of Aloha like myself? I would think the forum topics we would be discussing might probably contain other topics. This may be similar as when Radiant finally separated the user summits. They used to contain both resellers and large customers. It is more productive now that it is separated, as resellers seem to have other needs and issues than the larger customers.

I love talking about the Aloha product and developing on it is alot of fun, but maybe you and I are looking at the product from different views and needs because of who we are.

Cheers!

MegabyteCoffee.com

 

[Numfar]

Point of Sale distributor with over 20 years experience with systems from fast food to fine dining.

 

[coorsman]

Thanks MegabyteCoffee,

I am looking at the product from an end user perspective. As a former restaurant owner 10+ years I used Squirrel and have end user experience with Aloha as well. Depending on the type of restaurant you have I think Aloha is better at fast food and Squirrel is better at fine and casual dining and quick service bar. I would get a demo on Squirrel and also the new Squirrel in a Box system.

 

[SwampGas]

6.5.8 Has been a fantastic release. One of the best we have seen in years. I plan on having all 500 sites upgraded in the next two weeks.

We have also purchased their Command Center Product which we will be hosting in our own datacenter and not using it as a hosted service. It's a great product. It works well, and helps me pass some PCI rules.

Overall, we have customized Aloha very heavily from anything from reports, creating an alcohol age verification piece, and even token dispensing.

We also have our own Aloha Enterprise servers in our own data-center instead of using the hosted Alohaenterprise.com service. The majority of reports generated on this are our own and not the canned reports and alerts that come with Alohaenterprise.com.

We are, in fact very tied to the system to say the least. For what the Aloha system is capable of and what we are doing with the system has allowed us to do the things we have. Most other POS systems cannot and do not allow for the amount of customizations we have built. When we were searching years ago for a POS, nothing came close, or the companies did not want the customer to have as much control as we did. Our relationship with Radiant is very good. I understand the direction they are heading and agree with it for the most part.

I mentioned the stuff above because with all I do with the Aloha product, I do recommend Aloha for any size concept.

But if you are not going to take advantage of all it has to offer -Even from the basic installation of features, then moving to something smaller and simpler is probably the right thing to do.

My fear with Squirrel these days, is they are not growing, they've been shrinking. And I believe they have changed ownership a couple of times in the last 12 years isn't a good sign either. Squirrel was top dog at one time, and they could've remained in the lead, but the Squirrel gods in Canada didn't seem to keep the product heading in the same direction where the rest of the world and other POS systems went and grew. -Years ago when we were looking for a new POS system, they were also considered.

Bottom line, the choice is yours and yours alone, and I would encourage you to call companies and talk to the directors and VP's of the IT departments of other restaurant companies and listen to what they have to say about the product(s) they are using. I get a few calls each year myself. You'll find they are willing to tell you what you want to know from a hands-on perspective.

MegabyteCoffee.com

 

[coorsman]

My best friend is one of the top Squirrel resellers and can answer all of your questions.
Check em out at Cabaretsystems.com

 

[coorsman]

Was on call last night and had 2 relatively new Aloha customers with trashed trans.log's in the middle of a 25K+ day a huge bar environment 12+ terminals at each. Over 500 customers in the building when the system crashed one at 10:30pm and one at 2am Mirror log and fixlog wouldn't fix it.

Had to start with a new trans.log in the middle of a jammin night, needless to say the are ready to throw Aloha out the door.

Redundancy is one thing but when a potential loss of business in the middle of the day because of dbf dos files, using SQL based file system is much more stable and secure.

 

[SwampGas]

Tell Stan I said Hi.

If an Aloha system loses a trans.log, then something else there is dead wrong. Can't tell you the last time we had a trans.log go bad for no reason.


MegabyteCoffee.com

 

[coorsman]

Oh it would be great to have all of our customers on one version. Our customers span from versions 4.2, 5.2, 5.3,6.1 6.2 and 6.4 and now 6.5. The problem with getting everyone on the same version is they have to upgrade , servers, terminals, operating systems. Very costly, almost better to buy a new system when you consider the only piece of equipment left are usually the printers. I don't understand why Aloha has to charge to upgrade the software. It's a nightmare keeping up with RFC'S for each version.

Trans.log issues occur weekly and can most of the time be repaired with grind or fixlog, but in Friday's case I'm sending it to Radiant.

 

[awbbar]

If your having a lot of trans.log errors
something else must be wrong at sites.
The Aloha Versions does not necessarily require more processing power just Microsoft updates. Not recommended but you can get win98 to work with Aloha 6.4.x
As for upgrading . If it works and no need for new features ;leave it alone.
I have used some of the new tools Radiant has developed
and it makes support/deployment much easier.

 

[alohaakamai3]

I've worked with about 6 big players in the last 12 years-I'm an old far like DTSMAN (Bo). I don't have any personal experience with Squirrel, but I have about 10 years with Aloha.

Just my humble observations on the installations here (not getting into business models, dealer networks, etc on this one).

Aloha has definitely gotten more stable over the years as it's grown. That being said, however it's always seemed pretty finicky.

Yes, if you're getting corrupt translogs weekly, you've got a power or network communication issue going on. 99% of these are a corrupt write to the log due to some time of "break" in communication between terminal and back office.

However, Aloha systems often seem to have a pretty wide definition of things that are supposedly "wrong". It often does seem as though minor network and power hipcups cause major problems with Aloha. So, while by definition, there may be something that is not entirely optimal- you have if maybe Aloha isn't just a little too sensitive in struggling throw anamolies, where other systems might pull through without a problem.

I guess what I am driving at is that I have seen Aloha choke on more seemingly mior things (like a particular piece of hardware it doesn't like) or some proprietary setting than I have other systems.

Aloha installations, more than any other product it seems-fall into 2 categories. Those that run great and you almost NEVER hear from, and those that have problems up the ying yang.

Remember Metabyte, you are a wise and knowledgable dude with a lot of experience with Aloha. Most dealships don't have access to people like you, where these problems can seemingly linger forever, if they are ever narrowed down at all.

 

[DTSMAN]

As soon as he mentioned he was a Beta site, I knew I wasn't going to bother. Let Radiant fight that battle.
Good points alohaakamai, you almost never know if it is a Windows networking issue or an Aloha issue, or a combination, but the translog issues have been cut more than half since 5.0.

Bo

Remember,
If the women don't find you handsome,
they should at least find you handy.
(Red Green)

http://www.redgreen.com

 

[alohaakamai3]

Yeah, it's pretty rare that I get corrupt logs anymore. I used to have my pager blowing up every Saturday morning when I was on call with one or two of these. And like Coorsman stated, the huge problem with this is obviously that it completely takes the system down- as opposed to not just being able to get to a couple of guest checks or some other annoying problem other systems might have.

And obviously, the more terminals you have, the more chances you have of these write errors (as well as other types of failures).

Anymore, it seems EDC issues seem to be the most common calls, more so than translogs (settling errors, etc). I don't think they've increased, as much as I think translog issues have decreased, thereby making it more common.
I would say simple EOD issues (which are sometimes translog related) are the most common after that. And that could be a related to another catch 22 in another thread- it seems as though allowing EOD to be run by the master temrinal, instead of doing on the back of house, would go a long way to reduce these problems. But that would compromise the effectiveness of Aloha's system redundancy.

Ideally, I'd like to see the back office run EOD, and have the master run it only when in redundant mode.

 

[coorsman]

Just spent an entire day installing Aloha Take Out, all .net 3.0 programming, looks great but VERY buggy. The programming is all over the place but was told the entire Aloha software will eventually be written in .net.

I heard Aloha will be re-written in the next few years to support Vista and Win7 using .net standards.

Kinda sounds like when Squirrel kicked DOS to the side 7 years ago and started from scratch to we-write in Windows Native and SQL. They had with the first few releases but now it's really stable.

I was really impressed with the release of this information years ago on the Squirrel terminals using Linux.

Check out this web link.

http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/4798

 

[lawnmidget]

Aloha is a nightmare! Then again, most of the calls i get are for older versions...maybe things have gotten better. We always tell our callers: UPGRADE TO RADIANT. hahahhahaaaa

 

[coorsman]

Telling my colleagues yesterday that I was glad to be an Aloha tech. Spent 4 hrs upgrading to 6.4.11 all the terminals had to be re-installed individually, SSl wouldn't work on EDC, the site was on dial out all day. Today we found some information on the AKB site about an INI setting that had changed in the newer version to use SSL and HTTPS1.

All the issues keep me in a job