NCR Corporation

Date Founded: 1884

Industry: Business machines, information technology

Corporate Headquarters: Duluth, Georgia

Type: Public

Overview

NCR—called National Cash Register Company for its first ninety years of existence—has played a vital role in the development of consumer-service industries, particularly retail and banking. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, it pioneered the spread of cash registers to retail stores across the United States. These machines sped up customer service and gave businesses accurate records of total sales and sales by category. Nearly a century after its founding, it helped launch a new age in retail by selling barcode scanners, which sped the work of cashiers further and, once barcode systems were fully developed, led to greater inventory control.

In the course of its development, the company changed its name to the shortened NCR, entered the computer industry, briefly spent time as an AT&T subsidiary, and shifted headquarters from its birthplace in Dayton, Ohio, to Duluth, Georgia. In early 2018, NCR opened a new global headquarters in downtown Atlanta, a campus consisting of two towers that houses approximately five thousand employees. Focused on adapting to the developing technology needs of retailers and other industries, NCR has developed new capabilities for automatic teller machines (ATMs), worked on signature-recognition software, installed countless self-service kiosks to help airline passengers check-in and supermarket customers check out their purchases, and marketed cloud-based point-of-sale capabilities.

With revenues of approximately $7.8 billion, NCR ranked 466th among the top US corporations in 2022, according to the Fortune 500. When NCR began, railroads and horse-drawn vehicles were the chief modes of transport, telephones were relatively new, department stores were in their infancy, and national banks did not exist. Its adaptation to several technological changes and shift from providing hardware to providing software and other technologies has given the company flexibility and staying power.

History

In 1874 saloon owner James Ritty and his mechanic brother invented the cash register. One of their customers—dry goods store owner John H. Patterson—was impressed. In 1884, he and other investors bought their patent and formed the National Cash Register Company. Patterson quickly implemented his vision of selling cash registers nationally, using new techniques to train, organize, and compensate his sales team. He also established a service operation to keep the machines running after sale.

The company grew, aided in part by the contributions of two men. Thomas Watson Sr. was Patterson’s sales manager before leaving to lead the company that became International Business Machines (IBM). Charles F. Kettering invented the first electric cash register before leaving to found Delco.

By the mid-1910s, Patterson’s company dominated the cash register market. That domination resulted in antitrust convictions for Patterson, Watson, and others. The verdicts were later overturned, however.

In the 1920s, the company began making accounting machines and continued to grow, with sales of $49 million by 1928. In 1929 it bought a typewriter company to enter that market. The Great Depression hit the company hard, but the company survived. During World War II, National Cash Register produced war goods and took part in the secret effort to build machines that could decode the German Enigma code device.

After the war, business boomed. In addition to its traditional product lines, NCR entered the computer industry, purchasing the Computer Research Corporation in 1952. Its biggest success of the 1950s was the Post-Tronic, which banks used for accurate and efficient recording of transactions. The 1960s saw the introduction of new computer lines, increasingly a company focus. A long strike in 1971 led to the company’s first loss since the Great Depression, but NCR—as it was renamed in 1974—rebounded, in part because the computer division began making a profit. In 1974, the company introduced the first commercial barcode scanner.

By the late 1980s, NCR was the world’s foremost supplier of automatic teller machines (ATMs). Then, it was purchased by AT&T in a hostile takeover. Integration of the two companies was difficult, and they never fully meshed. Just five years after buying it, AT&T decided to spin off NCR.

After regaining independence in 1997, NCR resumed its efforts to provide innovative solutions for business partners, especially in retail and banking. Due to the purchase of Teradata in 1991, it was the repository of huge amounts of business data, which opened it to the data mining business. The purchase of Compris Technologies and Dataworks increased its services to the food-service industry and check-clearing operations.

In the 2000s, NCR sold off its computer manufacturing capacity to focus on business services and software. Innovations continued, including a 2003 patent for signature recognition software. In 2007, it spun off Teradata as a separate company. In 2010, it introduced NCR Silver, a cloud-based, point-of-sale system for small retailers using iPads and iPhones. In a similar effort, it was announced in 2016 that the company had acquired CimpleBox, a back-office software that can be synced with NCR Silver to provide simpler technology for smaller and medium-sized businesses. NCR had come a long way from making cash registers.

The late 2010s and early 2020s saw NCR continue to adapt to changing economic conditions, particularly by further branching out into business services and software. In April 2018 a new CEO, Mike Hayford, took over the company, helping continue this trend. Under Hayford's leadership, the company also adapted in other ways; by 2022, the company had begun shifting toward subscription and as-a-service sales while de-emphasizing the sale of perpetual software licenses. In the meantime, NCR continued to expand internationally. The year 2021 saw the company open its largest European technological campus to date in New Belgrade, Serbia.

Impact

While its sales do not reach the level of information technology competitors such as HP and IBM, NCR has had a far-reaching impact over the course of its history. Its point-of-sale terminals, ATMs, and kiosks are found in restaurants, supermarkets, banks, and airports around the world. The company claims to be involved in hundreds of millions of transactions worldwide every day and also lays claim to over three thousand US patents, with many more in other countries.

NCR embraced new technologies over time—and has continued to do so. From developing the first electric cash register to the marketing of the first commercial bar code reader to the production of ATMs, point-of-sale terminals, and kiosks, the company has been part of the leading edge of retail and banking machines. The company even worked with a software firm to develop two-way video technology to be placed in ATMs so that banking customers could, at any hour, have a live chat with a bank representative to ask questions if needed. It was also active in preparing ATMs and point-of-sale devices to accept the EMV "smart card" credit devices.

In addition, founder John Patterson’s approach to sales was unusual for the time. He gave the sales force intensive training, required them to follow a dress code of suits and white shirts, assigned them specific areas as sales territories, and installed both sales quotas and attractive commissions. The company’s success spurred imitators. While those sales approaches might be a thing of the past now, they helped build other companies. Indeed, Thomas Watson was inspired by Patterson’s ideas and his own experience at the company in shaping the sales and management approach of the company he led, IBM.

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