iOB Business becomes a Star VIP Partner

We all understand that technology is playing an ever-increasing role within our lives. From using the web to communicate with friends and family during these unprecedented times right the way through to making purchases, everything is driven by technology.

However, to get the most out of technology, it needs to be deployed within an ecosystem. Think about the desktop computer/laptop market, almost every machine in the past was preloaded with the Microsoft Windows operating system. This meant that users were invested in that ecosystem from day one.

A more recent example is the phenomenal rise of Apple. Most people that own one Apple device, be it an iMac, MacBook or iPad, will go on to invest in other Apple products and services. This again retains the customer within their ecosystem and maximises their lifetime value.

With that being said, we believe it is important for our technology to start to create its own ecosystem whereby we integrate a number of features within our technology platforms. We’ll talk more about some innovations we are bringing to our network in a future blog post.

The focus of this week's blog is to announce that we are now officially a Star VIP Partner which means our technology platforms, in particular our Food Ordering platform, has a world-class print solution in place.

Star Micronics
They are one of the world's largest print manufacturers and have highly sophisticated print technology. Formed over 60 years ago, Star boast clients such as Spec Savers, Costa Coffee and Burger King amongst many others.

We feel that the Star philosophy of providing retailers with innovative, easy to use and cost effective solutions is ideal for all types of businesses and something that could benefit our partners and their clients.

What does this partnership mean to us?
Working with Star and becoming a VIP Partner was an easy decision for us as a company and in particular for our technology platforms. One of the key aspects of our Food Ordering platform is the simplicity of customers transacting with a business but also the business owner being notified of the order.

Our integration with Star printers allows our technology to take advantage of cloud based thermal printing to offer each client a further incentive of working with our partners. Our team of developers is in the final stages of testing before this is rolled out to our global network of partners.

This will make it very seamless for food and drink based businesses to receive real time print outs of every order that has been completed through our Food Ordering platform. It further reinforces our decision to invest in creating and refining our proprietary software.

Technology drives businesses forward
We are already in the fortunate position of having technology platforms that integrate with a whole host of household names. However, our partnership with Star brings a level of hardware to our Food Ordering platform.

For example, our Social Posting platform already uses API’s for all the major social networks. We have integration with Google and Apple respectively for various elements within our ecosystem and we’re proud to be one of the first ordering platforms that also accepts cryptocurrency via BitPay.

James Mohamed, Chief Technology Officer and Co-Founder of iOB Business stated,

“We are really proud of the strategic partnerships we have developed with other like-minded technology providers. Integrating the Star print solutions into our platforms allow our partners to offer an end-to-end experience that seamlessly blends the virtual and real world together. We look forward to rolling out this integration imminently as well as showcasing some other technology development we have in the pipeline.”

Partner benefits
Everything we strive to achieve as a head office organisation is to help our Partners build long term Digital Agencies that add value to their clients businesses. The Star VIP Partner programme allows us to deliver new integrations to our Food Ordering platform (and future platforms) to be compatible the leading provider of thermal printers using Star's bespoke CloudPRNT technology.

From our Partners' perspective, this brings a number of benefits to their Digital Agency. For example, it makes our Food Ordering platform even more attractive to prospective clients. Aside from the huge cost savings a business can experience by moving away from third party content aggregators, our Partners can now provide an industry leading print solution to compliment our technology.

With more integrations and platforms planned in the future, it truly is an exciting time to be helping businesses with their digital transformation.

Summary
As we have seen throughout this blog, we are proud of our technology and the way in which we can bring other solutions into our technology ecosystem. To find out more about our Star printer integration as well as how you can launch a Digital Agency with us, contact our team today.

Until next time, take care.