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The tech giant Oracle Corp. early this summer launched a cloud-based payments-processing service aimed at the hotly contested restaurant market, and early on Wednesday the company added a handheld device for servers to use tableside.
The new terminal, dubbed the Oracle Micros Simphony mobile order and pay device, runs on the Android operating system and allows servers to call up multiple menu configurations while managing orders and taking payments at curbside, in the restaurant, or by the pool, Oracle says. The device accepts contactless payments via cards or mobile wallets.
The underlying Simphony operating system allows restaurants to track revenue as well as card-processing costs, Oracle says. The device is available for now in the U.S. market, the Austin. Texas-based company adds. Information regarding pricing for the device was not immediately available.
The new handheld emerges as rivalry for the hospitality business has heated up, with technology featuring contactless options having assumed a high priority in the wake of the pandemic. Indeed, demand for contactless tableside payments acceptance has attracted new entrants as well as new products and services from established players in the space, including major processors such as Shift4 Payments Inc., Toast Inc., Revel Systems, and Block Inc.’s Square platform.
The new terminal’s link to the Oracle Food and Beverage Payment Cloud Service, introduced in June, could give it a boost. Oracle bills the platform as standing alone in offering contactless payments and mobile-wallet acceptance with fixed rates, and with no long-term contracts or monthly minimum volume. At the platform’s launch, Oracle highlighted its ties to the big payments provider Adyen NV, which had signed on to provide processing. Based in Amsterdam, Adyen ranks among the 10 biggest processors of U.S. payments volume, according to data from researcher The Strawhecker Group.
The new device, as well as the platform behind it, rely on expertise from long-time hospitality-technology vendor Micros, which Oracle acquired in 2014 for $5.3 billion.
