The Pinnacle Corporation was founded in 1990 by Bob Johnson, Keith Chapman, and Peter Steele in response to the convenience store industry’s need for an automated manager’s workstation. Pinnacle solutions are now automating systems over 300 companies throughout the United States.
Prior to founding The Pinnacle Corporation, Bob and Peter were employed by the Norand Corporation (Retail Systems Division). Norand manufactured an integrated fuel control and scanning POS device specifically designed for the petroleum and convenience store industries. Bob was Vice President and General Manager of the Convenience Store business unit.
While the President of Pinnacle, Bob has served as past Chairman of the Supplier Committee of the National Association of Convenience Stores (NACS) and has been instrumental in advancing the NACS technology standards efforts. He was also on the NACS Retail board and has served as Chairman of the POS/Back Office technology standards committee for NACS.
Peter Steele is the Senior Vice President of Development and IT for Pinnacle. At Norand, Peter was a Senior Systems Engineer for the convenience and fast food industries. At one point, he was responsible for the design specification of the standard convenience store POS product, including scanning and fuel dispenser control. Prior to that, Peter served as Systems Engineer in Norand’s Research & Development division; he participated in all phases of the development of a POS scanning system for hardware and variety stores featuring up to 90,000 SKUs and automatic order generation.
Bob and Peter were involved in the development, sale, and installation of the ProfiMax system and the Norand POS system. The one piece that was missing in this package was the store manager’s workstation. After unsuccessful attempts to get Norand to develop such a system, it was decided that a new company could be founded with this one product in mind. The Pinnacle Corporation was formed and development of the Oasis™ Store Manager Workstation began.
In late 1994, development began on the Palm™ touch screen POS system. After seven months of development, the first Palm system was installed in July 1995 at Fast Break Stores in Snow Hill, North Carolina. Today, there are hundreds of thousands of Palm transactions processed every hour throughout the United States.
Pinnacle’s foundation back office product, Oasis, was rewritten for Microsoft® Windows™ in 1998, then again in 2005 as Pinnacle made the migration toward browser-based solutions and a common database platform. Pinnacle now provides a majority of solutions via browser-based platforms, taking advantage of leading technologies and the power of Microsoft SQL Server as a database platform.
In December 1998, Pinnacle merged with Software Assurance Corporation; SAC was a primary supplier of wholesale and retail fuel distribution systems, including the product Fuel Smart™, which gave Pinnacle the industry’s leading petroleum accounting system. SAC also had an excellent Windows-based price book system that was the foundation for Pinnacle’s current price book solution. SAC’s founder, Roger Wall, is Senior Vice President of Client Services for Pinnacle. Roger founded SAC in 1992 and has over 20 years of experience developing automation systems for the petroleum industry. Roger and the SAC employees gave Pinnacle a vast knowledge and experience base in petroleum automation.
Beginning January 2017, Pinnacle sold its retail back office and fuel solutions to fully focus on the innovative technology evolving in the consumer loyalty and mobile environment. The Pinnacle Affiniti Mobile platform plays a crucial and exciting role in the progression of our Mobile and integrated Loyalty offerings.
Affiniti is based on decades of dedication and experience in the convenience store industry. Through partnership and collaboration with clients, Pinnacle created a mobile platform with the flexibility, ease and control that retailers demand. The consumer and corporate apps are built in a way that enable Pinnacle to continually expand the feature set and add incremental value for all clients- without having to retrofit each individual client’s app- so they can start taking advantage of new features immediately.
This focus on the consumer experience also translated to the Palm point of sale solution. Pinnacle’s point of sale (POS) system, the first Windows-based, touch screen POS available for this market, is specifically designed for the petroleum/convenience retail industry. Pinnacle’s Palm POS remains the fastest and most flexible platform in the market today. A strength that has and will continue to propel Pinnacle’s POS solution forward lies in the strategy that the Palm POS platform protects and preserves the retailer’s investment. The architecture you ran yesterday will be what you run tomorrow; Pinnacle innovates with software, not hardware.
Pinnacle provides the tools and solutions required to address today’s most pressing industry issues, such as escalating credit card fees, fuel theft, supply issues, consumer loyalty, inventory control, foodservice, and workforce management.
