By: Jim Roddy, President & CEO at the RSPA
RSPA’s 750+ member companies help me keep my finger on the pulse of the retail IT channel, and boy did they do that in a big way last week.
The first part of the week I traveled to Toronto for the Restaurants Canada Show, held March 8-10 at the International Centre, and the RSPA Canadian Community networking event the evening of March 9. The end of the week I attended the 2026 NCC Dealer Conference March 12-14 at the Westin Poinsett in downtown Greenville, SC, helping the ISV and their VAR partners celebrate the company’s 40th anniversary.
That’s a lot of miles but, more importantly, a lot of conversations about our industry. Here’s what I heard that’s most pertinent for retail IT VARs and ISVs.
VARs & ISVs Care Tons About AI – Practical AI
Everybody’s talking AI, but VARs and ISVs aren’t listening to everything you have to say about it. Solution providers care about practical applications of AI. An RC Show exhibitor (not an RSPA member), showed at their booth on a video loop a robot climbing a 10-degree incline. Good for the robot, I’m sure his mom is proud, but how in the world does that help a restaurant?
AI on its own doesn’t matter; outcomes do. Two RSPA members I talked AI with at our Canadian Community reception repeated that phrase to me several times during our chat. These VARs are using whatever technology is available to help their customers – AI or not. Over breakfast at NCC, a reseller groaned when describing how overwhelming it’s been for her to separate AI noise from practical applications.
For extensive guidance on practical AI for retail IT VARs and ISVs, visit the new RSPA AI Resource Hub which was the foundation of my NCC presentation “How Leading RSPA VARs are Leveraging AI.” When my slide showed a QR code to the AI Hub, the majority of the nearly 100 attendees picked up their phones to snap it.
Niche ISV Challenges: Differentiation & Speed to Market
The RC Show expo hall featured tons of food vendors and a relatively small section dedicated to tech, but a high percentage of vendors in that IT area were pitching their AI voice agents for restaurants. They each did a fine job explaining what they do, but I would struggle today to articulate how they’re different from each other.
That’s a communication challenge for everyone in our space but especially niche ISVs. Your communication has to make clear how you’re different and how you’re better.
Another challenge for niche ISVs is speed to market. More than one RC Show exhibitor I met with was pursuing a very deliberate growth plan. For example, a restauranteur was showcasing for the second year at the RC Show his simple-yet-unique homegrown restaurant application. He’s doing most everything himself – no investors, no employees, no partnerships.
I’m not saying he’s wrong – there’s more than one path to business success – but he’s risking another tech savvy company copying his idea and gaining traction in the market before he does. ISVs who are testing, measuring, and adapting at a fast rate have a better chance of ultimately determining what works best.
SMB Tech Providers Drive Innovation
RSPA VAR and ISV members tend to be under 25 employees, and several of them shared with me they see that as a significant advantage for these key reasons:
- Their decision makers are naturally closer to their customers
- As a result of being closer, their team listens more intently
- Smaller teams are less likely to get comfortable because they’re not insulated from customers
- SMB providers can adapt their product faster than an organization slowed by layers of approval and competing priorities
At the Canadian Community event, pretty much every one of the nearly 120 attendees were either the business leader, on the leadership team, or a director. They exchanged direct contact information; nobody said “my people will call your people.”
At NCC, owners Doug and Jody Harris were in the room with the attendees. They didn’t just poke their head in to say hello; from start to finish, they sat among their partners, listening to every presentation and every partner question.
This you-heard-it-here-first information can be converted into product adaptations or new solutions altogether. And with AI reducing development time, SMB solution providers can accelerate their ideas to market faster than ever before.
Forge Knowledge Partnerships
The path to retail IT channel success starts with what I’ll call “knowledge partnerships” which I witnessed in Toronto and Greenville. Don’t limit your conversations only to someone you could potentially go to market with.
In Canada and at NCC, I saw many successful VAR and ISV leaders – including competitors – picking each other’s brains about their experiences to help each other navigate a challenge or seize an opportunity. We’re all in a fight vs. the margin-obliterating, VC-backed, 800-number, one-size-fits-all POS providers who don’t have a channel, so exchanging battle tactics helps us all.
Because if they win, we all lose.
Longevity + Relationships = Channel Success
Longtime NCC President Chuck Prince opened the conference commemorating the ISV’s 40-year anniversary and sharing stories of how the organization got here from its founding in 1986. What struck me was the longevity of many personal relationships between NCC and its partners.
In 2009, Prince left Toshiba TEC for NCC, and some of his co-workers and several dealers followed him. Prince called out 11 resellers who joined NCC 17 years ago through its then-new partner program – and nearly every one of them was in the room, still going strong with NCC. Prince also honored RSPA VAR member Lucas Systems, an NCC partner for 29 years.
Harkening back to 1986, Prince referred to the original Top Gun movie and its catch phrase “never leave your wingman.” Prince called the honored resellers “our original wingmen” and said, “That’s something we’ve tried to be. We’ve tried to be really good wingmen for our partners.”
“Stable & Rugged”
Prince presented that phrase in the context of the goals of NCC solutions, but the stories he told showed that stable and rugged personal relationships precede product partnerships. Discussing the company’s four decades of success, Prince attributed it to several longtime employees and reseller partners. He said in his early days, NCC’s partner philosophy was simply, “Doug wants everybody to want to work with us.”
In Toronto, RSPA’s Canadian members talked about their challenges not in “woe is me” terms but in a more matter-of-fact manner about how they’re navigating choppy waters. They’re leaning on their experienced teams and long-term partners – while mixing in new partners – to serve their customers and their bottom line. (P.S. Never bet against Canadians. They settled the tougher half of North America.)
Channel Travels News & Notes
Prince shared that 42% of restaurants were not profitable in 2025, and he offered to VARs four survival tools to help them:
- Drive more traffic to their restaurant
- Reduce operational overhead through dual pricing/cash discounting programs, low-cost or no-upfront-cost POS systems, labor optimization, and inventory control
- Implement loyalty and rewards programs, featuring NCC’s new partnership with RSPA member mKonnekt
- Be there to serve your merchant; local resellers can be the hero of the story
James Sanders of RSPA member CRS addressed the current chip shortage and predicted it’s likely to extend beyond 2026. The rapid expansion of AI infrastructure has significantly increased the demand for memory components. As a result, RAM pricing increased significantly and hardware manufacturers may adjust sourcing strategies. For VARs, hardware pricing may fluctuate even more than typical, and resellers will likely react by exploring alternative vendors.
Sponsoring the RSPA Canadian Community Networking Event were apg, BlueStar, Citizen, Datacap, Global Payments, Ingenico, National Retail Solutions (NRS), Partner Tech, Shift4, Star Micronics, and Toshiba.
The major sponsors of the NCC conference were all RSPA members. Platinum sponsors: CRS, Global Payments, HANASIS, and Platinum Relations. Gold sponsors: Datacap and Real Time Ordering (RTO).
