I hope that I'm not too late to this!

Idea

I want to provide a managed network and lift and shift to the cloud service for retail stores with a back office point of sale system and connected POS.

Why might it work?

In this country, out of the available Point of Sale vendors, very few of them currently provide an actual cloud platform for individual stores and the offerings for head offices are either limited or non existent.

This creates some issues;

• Space required in a store for back office pc's/servers (often they are shoved into a corner and quickly become a fire hazard)
• Limited ability for store owners/managers to access their pos systems remotely for reporting/"oh shit" orders/doing something that someone at the store does not know how to do.
• Cost of back office/server hardware is often a burden to the stores to purchase due to financial constraints (5k + Install for a brand new server, 2.5k for a back office PC)
• More people bringing in their own devices and plugging them into the local networks is a source of viruses
• More and more data is being exported out of these stores over rather poor upload speeds.

This is about enabling the stores to come into the current age with technology.

What have I done about the idea?

I've spent a decent chunk of time (~500 hours) lifting and shifting a couple of back office machines up into the cloud, hooking them back into a live store and QAing the end result. This has been time consuming but incredibly useful as I've had to refine the technical plan quite a few times.

Skills

• Technical skills
• Industry knowledge
• Prior success in doing this in a testing environment
• Project Management
• Requirements elicitation
• Store auditing

Skills/things I lack

• Sales/Account Management
• Marketing
• Accounting/Admin
• Capital

All in all, I'm confident that if I could get the business up and running that I could end up making a small profit by the fifth customer and being financially stable and capable of hiring an employee around the fiftieth but my figures may be way off, I don't really know.

If anyone is interested, I hope we talk, rather than someone flogging this idea.