As a leader in the Point-of-Sale industry, LPA Retail Systems made an important decision around 2017 to begin hosting our customers on what we call the LPA Counterpoint Cloud. This has been a partnership with LPA and our amazing friends at Point North Networks, local to the Twin Cities area of Minnesota.
Through my time as a Tier I tech and now the Service Manager, I have had the pleasure of seeing this solution morph into an immensely stable platform in which our customers trust us to host connections to their cloud instances of Counterpoint. Our customers have peace of mind knowing that their data is backed up at multiple times of the day, ensuring minimal disruption in case of any unforeseen events.
This feature proved extremely handy back in 2020. Covid had reared it’s ugly head, creating extreme uncertainty across the globe. To add to the stress of that year, The city of Minneapolis and the surrounding areas found itself in a time of civil unrest and rioting. In the midst of all this, as an Infantry Officer in the Minnesota National Guard, I found myself having to take leave to deploy to the Horn of Africa during that year. I remember a window of possibility that I would even be put on state active duty at the time to assist with the efforts to quell the unrest.
Back at LPA, our hard-working staff found a few instances where having the cloud infrastructure paid off. We have a long-time liquor store customer in Minneapolis that found themselves ransacked not once…but twice through all of this. Rioters destroyed the store….took alcohol…and also even took the registers. The old server was still on-site although it was no longer being used. When the president of our company visited the following morning, the cover had been torn off and an empty bottle of vodka was found inside along with dripping clear liquids. Had the server been still in use, there would be a high probability this customer of ours would have lost record of all transactions, inventory, Invoices…the list goes on. They have continued on as a business partly because their server was housed in the cloud unmolested!
We have not stopped there, as we also successfully run various API’s and integrations on the LPA cloud for a variety of customers, from a one location meat shop, to multi-site liquor stores and even professional sports teams. As the years have gone on, we have been able to perfect this solution by leaps and bounds every year, as well as adding capabilities to this platform. If you are interested in learning more, give us a call!!
Written by Jerret Wright (LPA’s Service Manager)
