XP Embedded succes story

Working with an important player in the fast-food industry

The client

The client operates the world's biggest fast-food chain and is, undoubtedly, the most important player in this field worldwide.

When hearing the words "fast-food", most of us are instantly thinking of french fries and a juicy hamburger. But few of us can imagine the spectacular things that go on behind the counter, at least when we talk about the IT infrastructure.

Problem description

Despite having a special design, the cash registers from the client's restaurants are, in fact, ordinary PC's. And every PC needs an operating system. This type of hardware was used in the stores since 2002, but, given the fact that there was no standard OS or even a recommendation, each country chose its own solution, in most of the cases the option being Windows 98. Windows 98 was a very appreciated OS, especially for its stability, but it had its shortcomings in many other aspects:

  • Non-existing file security
  • There was no monitoring and management system that would allow managing a big number of devices efficiently
  • High price, due to the inappropriate licensing system
  • Generally, it was missing those features that are necessary for running mission critical applications

The solution

It became pretty clear for everybody that something as important as the cash registers working correctly could not be taken lightly. The minimum set of requirements that needed to be covered by the chosen OS was:

  • A well-thought security sistem
  • Very good stability and reliability
  • Professional technical support from the manufacturer
  • Fetures for management (local and remote) and monitoring
  • Large community of users, which would facilitate finding personnel for technical support
  • A licensing system adapted to the client's needs that would allow a better price per unit

At first, the Linux OS was considered as a possible choice. In the end, taking into consideration all the requirements, the XP Embedded OS was chosen as the final solution.

Problems that were encountered

Adapting the XPe OS to the specifics of the business made us face a unique set of challenges:

  • Minimizing installation time. The big number of registers that the tehnicians teams need to install in the shortest amount of time possible, in order to minimize the installation cost
  • Security updates. It was imperative to keep all the devices up to date with the security patches, but using the "Windows Updates" service was not available to use with the XP Embedded OS
  • Minimizing the space occupied on disk. Apart from the cash registers, there is also a special kind of PC's used in the stores, with limited capabilities. These devices have hard drives only 512 MB in capacity, that had to accommodate the OS, but also applications, the Java runtime, update packages and others.

Wrap-up

Over time, XP Embedded proved to be the right choice, being both stable and adequate to the business needs. The problems we had to overcome during implementation were mostly related to integrating the client's applications and adapting the OS to the business' specifics.