Built for Action, Informed by Standards
How ORCA operationalizes RTN concepts to drive our first-of-its-kind universal connectivity environment.
Some of the most frequent questions we get at ORCA are variations of “How does it work?”
What’s changed in the technology environment that’s enabling a shared infrastructure like this to be built?
How is ORCA overcoming the hurdles of integration and data silos?
What actually sets ORCA apart from middleware?
Those are simple questions with rather detailed answers. But to summarize:
The foundation of our infrastructure is the common language of standards—including those recently published by Restaurant Technology Network (RTN).
Today that standards-based interoperability enables ORCA to quickly, reliably, and flexibly facilitate communication between all the various participants in a tech stack; and go beyond that, deeply enriching these processes through orchestration and automation.
That’s the short answer; now let’s dig into the details to break down how ORCA is built to improve the tech stack at a fundamental level.
What are “standards?”
Industry think-tanks such as RTN have published “standards:” broad, descriptive vocabularies for data. Essentially, these are dictionaries that allow apps to better communicate (or often, communicate at all) without the need for costly, resource-intensive workarounds.
What’s ORCA?
Informed by those standards, ORCA provides a high-performance, event-driven orchestration layer to trigger restaurant operations.
ORCA does not simply mirror existing data dictionaries; it operationalizes them. That means we leverage these common industry concepts to ensure that ORCA-native events can be mapped seamlessly to existing systems, while maintaining a lean, "Engine of Action" philosophy that goes beyond static data modeling.
In other words, ORCA goes beyond communication to enrichment, creating workflows that enable instant action on all kinds of never-before-possible data interactions, finally activating long-untapped value for restaurants.
How are ORCA and RTN connected?
While ORCA is interoperable with multiple industry standards, we are most closely aligned with RTN’s; though there are key distinctions.
Conceptual Alignment: ORCA uses many of the canonical naming conventions familiar to RTN users to reduce integration friction.
A Dynamic System: ORCA is a standalone system of record for orchestration, built from the ground up to solve for latency and kitchen execution. These are challenges that static data standards are not designed to address.
Translation: Our adapters translate proprietary marketplace and POS data into ORCA's high-speed core, ensuring parity with industry references without sacrificing operational speed.
Does ORCA use RTN’s schema?
ORCA utilizes a proprietary "Core vs. Extension" namespace. We map specific RTN attributes into our namespaces to provide the best of both worlds: the descriptive depth of industry standards and the strict performance required for real-time orchestration. To achieve the sub-millisecond routing required for modern kitchens, we flattened and optimized the hierarchy, keeping only the "operational essence" in our core validation layer.
In short: ORCA utilizes RTN’s comprehensive dictionary and turns it into a dynamic information action system.
At the end of the day, standards provide ORCA the ability to facilitate universal communication of data. We then take that ability and turn it into action-based workflows that drive new value to restaurants.
Communication-based action—sounds simple, but it’s how we’ve built the basis for the next generation of tech stack.
Still have questions about ORCA? Discover more by connecting with our team.