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ATM management from afar
In many ways, the ATM world stands apart from the rest of the computer world. For example, at least for now, most entry-level cash dispensers still run on the obsolete operating system OS/2 and proprietary software.
January 7, 2002
In many ways, the ATM world stands apart from the rest of the computer world. For example, at least for now, most entry-level cash dispensers still run on the obsolete operating system OS/2 and proprietary software.
The highly proprietary nature of the market has led hardware vendors to write remote management software for their own products.
Proprietary party
Hansup Kwon, president and chief executive officer of Freemont, Calif.-based ATM maker Tranax Technologies, said that creating remote management software would not traditionally have been the responsibility of manufacturers.
"The financial business model is basically that the manufacturer sells the hardware and the rest is taken care of by the ISO or processor or whoever," he explained.
Yet according to Charlie McGratty, marketing manager for ATM management software designer Gasper Corp., of Dayton, Ohio, neither the ISOs nor the transaction processors developed software with which to manage their terminals.
"What happened was the major vendors with Base24 went ahead and created their own drivers," he said.
More recently, third party developers such as e-ClassicSystems and Morphis are getting into the remote management business. Their offerings are overdue, partly because deployers didn't at first see the need -- at least according to the vendors.
Scott Kleinman, Tranax's director of marketing, said, "This offsite retail ATM business has grown so rapidly in the last three or four years that people hadn't thought a whole lot about this monitoring challenge. Now they realize that their lives can be made a lot easier by making smart monitoring decisions."
Confusing concepts
Remote management can mean different things, depending on what deployers want to be able to do centrally, i.e., without resorting to sneakernet (as in putting on their sneakers and visiting each machine in the network to maintain it manually).
Remote management can mean monitoring ATM status messages to keep track of a machine's health. It can mean the ability to download application changes and advertising and promotional screens. It can mean retrieving and managing electronic journals. Or all of the above.
Additionally, new offerings such as e-ClassicSystems' ATM Manager Pro make it possible for deployers to examine the profitability of their fleets of machines.
Most management solutions are vendor-specific, so it's best that any deployer, to the extent possible, investigate remote management offerings before making a hardware decision. Click here to view some of the options
Conflicting stories
Vendors say that only their software can monitor their machines. This is only partly true. While vendors can write software to read status messages directly from each terminal, any third-party software can intercept these messages from the processor, provided the software knows how to interpret them.
Dan Palcznyski, group marketing manager for Dayton, Ohio-based NCR's Convenience Touchpoints Global Solutions Team, explained that vendor solutions are primarily terminal-based software, meaning that most of the activity happens at the terminal.
Yet, he pointed out, "As long as the information is captured by the host (the processor), then it can be captured; this is true of any machine."
Bill Jackson, chief technology officer of Long Beach, Miss.-based Triton Systems, agreed. "It is possible for a third party to take information that the host would receive and do some kind of status monitoring with it. We do provide a field that goes up with every message to the host that can update whoever is interested about the condition of the ATM. And this information can be passed directly on to some status system."
Additionally, third-party solutions can retrieve electronic journals from the processor, a big plus, considering problems found with downloading the journals manually.
Dan Sibila, business development manager of North Canton, Ohio-based Diebold, works with Diebold's RemoteLink product.
"We found from experience that oftentimes data gets corrupted when they're pulling it off the machine, or they accidentally delete it before they save it to a floppy," he said. "It's just become a real operational issue."
What third-party software can't do is download application changes, promotional screens, and make other software changes to an ATM using a proprietary, closed operating system such as those made by Triton or Tranax.
"Some of the competition doesn't allow software to be loaded on an ATM (by third party software)," Sibila said.
But as ATMs move to open standards, it will become possible.
"I think the easiest solution is to have everybody move to Windows 2000," Sibila said.
Using Windows operating systems, any vendor can write software to work with any hardware -- theoretically. Yet even if the software works, other issues may arise.
"Are you voiding warrantees?" Sibila speculated. "Because now you're loading somebody else's software application on there."
Pros and cons
Remote management promises the deployer more efficiency, more up time, and therefore, more profits. There's a cut for manufacturers as well, as they charge deployers for the software. But some say that the financial investment pays for itself in short order.
"If the manufacturer is closely involved in the management aspects of it, than the total cost of ownership goes down drastically, actually," Tranax's Kwon said. "We feel that the uptime of the machine is going up drastically at the same time."
He put it this way: "If we can save a distributor $1,000 per month, and if we charge only $500, that makes a lot of (business) sense."
Basic status reporting is integral to a successful operation, explained NCR's Palcznyski.
"If your actual unit is out of cash, if it's low on paper, if it has some kind of a functional jam that's corrupting it, that's the kind of messaging any owner of an ATM is going to want to know about," he said.
It's even possible for rules to be created that will alert administrators to problems by sending an e-mail or a page. The ability to take immediate action means getting the machine back up faster and cranking out transactions.
Comprehensive, archived journal records also make it possible for deployers to reconcile or better defend themselves from Reg E claims, said Tranax's Kleinman, "The goal of all these monitoring programs is to make it easier and more automatic."
Certainly journal archives safely maintained in a database are preferable to some of the problems faced by some deployers. Sibila mentioned difficulties such as cash replenishment staff not labeling diskettes or the ATM owner's less-than-ideal filing system.
"They might be simply putting it in a shoebox," he said.
While all of these advantages sound wonderful, current vendor-specific solutions lock ISOs and other deployers into hardware decisions. Deployers picking up ATMs from more than one vendor, through mergers or purchases, won't be able to manage them with the same software -- increasing both costs and hassle.
Not surprisingly, vendors would be happy to oblige. Tranax's Kwon said he'd love to make his software able to manage Triton machines, "if Triton would tell me how."
Not all third-party vendors make products geared to the small ISO market. Gasper, which recently announced it would combine its Gasper Manager software with business management software made by e-ClassicSystems, is primarily interested in financial institution and larger ISO clients, according to McGratty.
The business case
Partnership with Gasper notwithstanding, Norwood, Mass.-based e-ClassicSystems feels it has an offering important to smaller ISOs and banks. "That's where the meat of the market is," said Tom Meurer, president and founder of the Boston-based company.
He explained that his product fits in a different, heretofore untapped niche in the market to help ISOs deal with complex business relationships.
"Each placement has a processing cost, cash cost, merchant revenue sharing agreements or site or space rental, first or second line maintenance," he said. "There can be 10 or so partners in each location."
ATM Manager can sort all that out. In addition to the basic accounting module, the company offers enhancements such as a Cash Management module, and an Event Management module.
Event Management oversees business events, rather than machine status events, Meurer pointed out. He explained that the module helped ease business headaches associated with change of ownership, litigation, installations, de-installations, and other business functions.
As with other third-party software, ATM Manager gets its transaction feed from the host.
"We have automated a method to capture all the transaction statistics and amounts that went through your ATMs from the processors," he said.
Additional features helpful to ISOs include the ability to audit charges and know exactly how much the ISO should pay cash replenishment companies, merchants, sub-ISOs, and sales staff, for example.
"At the end of the month it (the software) can pass what you owe someone directly into a paying system like QuickBooks," Meurer said. <?xml:namespace prefix = o />
To 2000 and beyond
As more ATMs are sold using open standards-based Windows operating systems, more entry-level machines may be able to communicate directly with third party software. This should open up the market for management solutions a bit and give ISOs with mixed shops some relief.
But for the time being, deployers in the entry-level field must view their networks through vendor-colored glasses.
Included In This Story
Triton Systems
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