Backgrounder: Corporate

Xsilva Systems Inc.’s LightSpeed portfolio has its origins in a point-of-sale (POS) solution developed within the Mac retail environment by company founder and CEO Dax Dasilva, who has worked as a consultant and developer on the Mac platform since 1990.

While working for a Mac retail chain in Montreal seven years ago, Dasilva set out to develop an application that would fill a void in the market for a POS solution tailored to the Mac platform. His application attracted the interest of other Mac retailers. However, before its potential could be realized, external factors led to the retailer’s demise and the ownership of this POS application fell to creditors.

Taking stock of what he had created, and the positive feedback it sparked from employees who had used it, Dasilva set out to create a more flexible and elegant successor better suited for general commercial release that could easily be customized for a variety of retail environments.

Xsilva Systems Inc. was founded in 2005 with the mandate of creating the most compelling POS solution for the Mac in the marketplace under the name of LightSpeed. The beta version of the product quickly attracted several early adopters in the Montreal area. In July 2005 at industry tradeshow Macworld Boston, Xsilva caught the attention of the Apple Specialist Marketing Co-op (ASMC), a collective of independent retailers across North America who specialize in Apple products.

ASMC’s enthusiasm for LightSpeed and features such as a direct connection to Apple’s warranty servers helped propel the launch of LightSpeed 1.0 in October 2005. The ASMC community became the first customers for LightSpeed, providing invaluable feedback that guided LightSpeed’s development as a robust, reliable and feature-rich retail solution for the Mac platform. LightSpeed has become a standard POS solution for independent Apple retailers.

These early adopters have grown to become an effective channel to reach the general retail community with LightSpeed. Xsilva’s channel includes 275 resellers in 23 countries that multiply the efforts of its in-house sales team. LightSpeed has seen broad adoption in a number of retail verticals, such as fashion and décor, juvenile products and electronics. Its ease of use, elegance, stylish design and professional appearance have won many converts among both Mac and Windows users.

LightSpeed continues to evolve to provide retailers with a comprehensive suite of retail tools for traditional bricks-and-mortar and online retail that seamlessly integrates the front counter with back-office functions such as inventory management, order processing and billing. LightSpeed gives retailers the power to track and manage all aspects of their business. Retailers can expand the capabilities of LightSpeed with Web Store, which allows them to generate and maintain a fully customizable PHP- and CSS-based e-commerce site from their LightSpeed database.

Future iterations of the LightSpeed portfolio will include features that meet the needs of larger multi-store retailers and take advantage of the latest advances in the Mac OS X operating system to make LightSpeed even easier to implement, customize and manage.