SIMPHONY - SPI POS — bank compatibility

SIMPHONY - SPI is a point-of-sale system for hospitality and retail, built by Oracle. The SPI in the name is the Simphony Payment Interface — payment plumbing, and the thing your installer actually has to get right.

Certified on mx51, which is the engine behind several banks’ own terminal offerings rather than something a merchant buys by name.

Certified for tipping, phone and mail order and one till driving several terminals.

The mx51 integration uses Spice and was last certified in November 2022, on Windows.

This is Oracle Simphony certified through the Simphony Payment Interface. SPI is Oracle's own payment interface for Simphony, and it is one of the two routes Australian middleware uses to drive a terminal from the till — the other being the Oracle Payment Interface, OPI. So a quote that mentions SPI is telling you how the EFTPOS leg is wired, not that you are buying a different point of sale. If someone is selling you SPI as a product feature, push back and ask what it does that OPI does not for your setup.

The POS underneath is the former MICROS. That company was incorporated in 1977 as Picos Manufacturing, renamed Micros Systems in 1978, and ran out of Columbia, Maryland; by 2003 analysts put it at about 35% of the restaurant POS market. Oracle announced its acquisition in June 2014 for roughly US$5.3 billion and folded it into Oracle Food and Beverage and Oracle Hospitality. MICROS had itself grown by acquisition — Datavantage, CommercialWare, TIG Global and the UK's Torex among them — which is part of why the product has so many layers.

Practically: this is enterprise software for chains and hotels, sold and implemented through Oracle's channel, on an Oracle contract. The payments question for an Australian venue is which middleware and acquirer your specific build supports, and Linkly's Bridge for Oracle works through SPI and covers Simphony 2.9 and later. Worth settling who you call when the terminal stops talking to the till — Oracle, the middleware, or your bank — before you need the answer.

Oracle also has Oracle Simphony 19.3 via Linkly Bridge for Oracle, Simphony and Simphony First Edition.