As the saying goes, you can’t teach an old dog new tricks.
But how about a 141-year-old cash register company?
NCR Voyix, the godfather of the restaurant point-of-sale, is out to prove that it’s possible.
Founded in 1884 in Ohio as National Cash Register, NCR Voyix has built a dominant footprint in the restaurant tech market with its Aloha POS system, which is used by large chains and mom-and-pops alike. At the same time, NCR Voyix has faced stiff competition over the past decade from more modern, digitally native upstarts.
But the company has been working to reinvent itself. It has a new name and corporate structure, a new leadership team, a renewed customer-first philosophy and a fresh product pipeline. It hopes the changes will help it shed its reputation as a slow-moving corporate giant and extend its road map years into the future.
In other words, this is not your father’s NCR, or your grandfather’s, or even your great-grandfather’s, for that matter.
“Jokes aside, we’re a well-funded, 140-year-old startup,” said Miguel Solares, chief revenue officer for enterprise, who came out of retirement in March to head up the company’s sales team.
The transformation started, as they sometimes do, with a new name. In October 2023, the larger NCR Corp. split itself into two publicly traded entities. NCR Voyix focuses on restaurant and retail technology, and NCR Atleos houses NCR’s ATM business.
The separation simplified NCR Voyix’s restaurant vertical, allowing it to focus and move faster. It also paved the way for new leadership, including a new board chaired by James Kelly, the former CEO of payments company Evo.
In February, Kelly was elevated to CEO of NCR Voyix, and he has quickly made his presence felt both inside the company and out. At NCR Voyix's Atlanta headquarters, he ended a policy that required employees to swipe a key card to enter the executive wing, inviting more communication. He is known to pull people out of their offices for impromptu collaborations, a habit that employees have dubbed “getting Jim’d.”
When he isn’t bouncing around the office, Kelly is likely on the road. Over the past six months, he has met with the CEOs of 72 of NCR Voyix’s restaurant customers, many of whom said it was the first time they’d ever been visited by the chief executive of a vendor. Solares has heard similar feedback during his own client visits.
“They say to me, ‘Miguel, we’ve never seen this NCR before,’” he said. “‘We just haven’t had someone like you come and talk like that.’”
Solares has a deep restaurant background. His father operated Burger King, Popeyes and Firehouse Subs locations, and Solares himself has spent his entire career in the restaurant POS space, first at Sicom Systems and then Global Payments after it acquired Sicom. Kelly recruited him to NCR Voyix in part because he believed Solares knew how to talk to restaurant operators.
“He said, ‘You’re the guy we need for this transformation,’” Solares recalled. “‘When you talk to a customer, they understand you. You speak their language.’”
It’s all part of the company’s new goal of being “customer-obsessed,” a trait that NCR Voyix has not always been known for.
“Sometimes you lose your way in business, and it’s back to the basics: Treat every customer as if they’re the only one,” Solares said. “That philosophy is really resonating.”
He said the new approach has been evident in a few recent customer wins. In April, NCR Voyix inked a new four-year contract with longtime customer Buffalo Wild Wings, snatching it away from a competitor at the last minute. It also extended its agreement with Raising Cane’s and landed a new customer in Ziggi’s, a small but fast-growing coffee chain, which will use NCR Voyix’s cloud-based Aloha POS.
The company still has some ground to cover, however. NCR Voyix’s total revenue fell 12.5% last year, to $2.8 billion, a trend that continued into the first quarter of 2025. It has attributed much of the decline to slowing demand for hardware. And it has been working to improve its technology to get that arrow pointing back up.
It has added more software integrations with other vendors, which has become a virtual necessity in modern restaurant tech stacks. It has also upgraded some key products, including its Aloha menu and back office management tools, which it expects to help accelerate growth this year.
It’s also readying a new product that it believes will be a game-changer: an edge computing system. Already in use at more than 8,500 retail locations, NCR Voyix will soon offer it to restaurants for the first time.
Edge is an alternative to cloud- and server-based data processing. It has an on-site component that allows restaurants to process information at the store level, which speeds up transactions and can act as a backup if the internet fails.
It also allows restaurants to “containerize” different parts of their operation and tech stack. In an edge environment, each application within the POS can be its own independent app, for instance. This makes it easier to update software, which can otherwise be time-consuming and disruptive. And if one piece of technology fails, the problem can be fixed without interfering with the rest of the system.
NCR Voyix is not the only restaurant tech supplier to offer an edge product, but it says its version is unique because restaurants can run their entire tech stack, including the POS, atop the edge layer.
“It’s where the world’s going,” Solares said. “There’s not a major brand that’s not talking about edge today.”
The company is currently piloting edge with two major chains to provide a proof of concept before making it more widely available.
Edge is a big part of NCR Voyix’s strategy to “future-proof” the business by providing the technology restaurants will need five or 10 years down the road. The company may be role-playing as a scrappy startup, but it is still a market leader, and it has a reputation to uphold.
“NCR is like the New York Yankees of this industry,” Solares said. “We have to live up to it.”
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