Midrange Stuff, OS/400 Edition

You think your factory floor is tough on terminals? Try spraying Coke and real butter-flavored popcorn on them, and see how they function. Regal Entertainment Group, the nation's largest chain of movie theaters, knows that the concession stand is no place for a greenhorn point-of-sale system. That's why it's rolling out IBM SurePOS terminals to all of its theaters. While these systems are nearly impervious to grime on the outside, Regal appreciates that Linux keeps things clean and simple on the inside.

Regal Entertainment Group operates more than 5,700 screens in 548 theatres in 36 states, through its three cinema lines, Regal Cinemas Corporation, United Artists Theatre Company, and Edwards Theatres. The company previously used cash registers at its concession stands to document the food and beverage orders from its patrons and to record the transactions. But the cash registers required error-prone manual processes at the end of the day to upload the sales data and inventory to the AS/400 Model 720 at the company's headquarters, in Knoxville, Tennessee. The cash registers also slowed down the transactions, which is annoying to customers in a rush for popcorn and soda before the start of a movie.

Todd King, Regal's vice president of technology information services, was in charge of designing a replacement system for the cash registers. He wanted a modern, fully computerized, point-of-sale system, of which there are plenty on the market to choose from. However, King was adamant that the POS (point of sale) terminals be able to handle the rigors of concession-stand life, and of these, there were four vendors with terminals that fit the bill.

"It was entirely about the POS system," King said. "It had to be food-hardened. It's an amazingly harsh environment in the concession stand. There's Coke flying everywhere, the popcorn, the butter. It's amazing."

King knew exactly the type of software and applications he wanted to run on these terminals, which made his selection much easier. In order to gain the vendor independence, King wanted to deploy Enterprise Java applications running on the Linux operating system. That way, Regal could design its application once, and run it on any hardware platform that supported Linux and Java, thereby minimizing the disruption if it ever chose to migrate to different hardware.

However, this requirement would pose a bit of a problem, in terms of the POS systems available on the market. Linux is a fairly young entrant in the POS market, and it doesn't offer the same variety of drivers--particularly for Java applications--as other operating systems, such as Microsoft's DOS and Windows.

King's rationale for not going the Windows route with the POS systems is a simple and universal one: money. "We're a frugal company. Always have been," he said. "All the options for customizing the kernel with Linux are real attractive. The whole design is based on the application being really easy to use, the keep-it-simple approach. We never wanted an application problem, just hardware. We felt better in Linux providing that than Windows."

By late 2001, King was getting ready to make his decision, and IBM hadn't even made its proposal yet. "About a year ago, we were on the edge," he said. "There weren't a lot of the Java POS drivers for Linux. I told the vendors, 'We need to do this,' and they said, 'We know, but it's way out there.' "

Then IBM made its grand, albeit somewhat belated, appearance. "IBM was late to the battle, but they were ready," King says. "They were into Linux, had the Java POS drivers built to work with the peripherals. They were really into working with us."

Regal selected IBM as the supplier of the POS systems, and Charlie Gooden, Regal's vice president of applications and development, led the design of the Java application. Today, the company has almost completed the second phase of the roll out, involving 2,700 touch-screen POS systems running a hardened version of Red Hat Linux, and plans to complete its full roll out of 3,500 POS systems by the end of next year. Regal also chose Linux to power a new generation of self-service ticket kiosks that hopefully will be coming soon to a movie theater near you.

While Linux has made some impressive gains in the server market in the last couple of years, Regal's deployment of Linux-powered POS systems--which is one of the largest, if not the largest, on record to date--shows that the open-source operating system is making some inroads at the check-out counter, too. "Everybody knows that Linux is proving itself everyday in the back office as a server. Everybody reads that," King said. "I don't have an opinion one way or the other of Linux on the desktop. But this was the perfect application for Linux. It was the right tool for the job."