Hosting for Parking Solutions

In my last blog entry, I said I thought I should stick to what I know (technology) and not dive too deeply into the industry side of parking that many people know so much better. I'll be keeping that in mind again today. So last month I went to the IPI (International Parking Institute) Conference and Expo in Las Vegas. This was my second IPI (after a bit over three years working in the technology side of the parking industry).

After seeing everything there, I have to say that I'm proud to work for T2. I knew we had some pretty cool stuff (end of shameless plug), but it really hit home how much T2 stood out in that room. Don't get me wrong. I'm not slamming anybody. I'm just so accustomed to thinking about technology meaning servers and terabytes of storage and hosting an Advanced Parking Solution. That makes it easy to forget that a lot of the industry has nothing to do with computers and that technology in parking often has nothing to do with computers.

T2 sells Parking Garage Software, Parking Citation Collections, Campus Parking Solutions, Handheld Ticket Writers and a whole lot more cool parking Technology. That's all cool stuff and I love working with it, but how cool is it to sell a giant ice melting machine that you can drive around. I may have lots of cool servers with a bunch of cool blinking lights, but I can't push a button to melt a bunch of snow off of a parking lot. That's got to be a lot more fun than making something go away with the delete key. Most interesting to me was all of the technology in that melting machine. It (and a few other booths) made me realize that lots of parking technology has to do with fuel efficiency and reliability without having even one server. That said, I think the melter had a few blinking lights so it still made me smile.

Happy Parking!

Last month I wrote about all of the data in the T2 Systems Hosting Environment. Since then we've added three more customers and almost two hundred million rows of data. Talk about a growing Parking Management System.

After writing my last Blog entry I realized that I should probably stick to what I know. Technology.  T2 Systems' Parking Solutions are just the reason I get to play with really cool stuff. I'm a geek. I like working with things that have lots of blinking lights and lots of acronyms. The guys on my team are geeks too. One of them will only admit to being a geek from 8-to-5. I don't believe it. I've seen his Facebook posts.

This month we're working on upgrading the part of our hosting environment that hosts the T2 Flex Web Servers. We've moving to the recently release Windows Server 2008 R2 for our Hyper-V hosts, adding more storage to our SAN, and implementing a new clustered file system that allows wicked-fast migration of virtual servers (yeah, wicked-fast is a technical term). We're also switching another rack of servers to 208 Volt Power.

So what does all that mean (other than fun for me and my fellow geeks)? It means more capacity, and more speed for T2 Systems' Parking Management System and more blinking lights for me.

Happy Parking!

Having worked for a banking technology company for nearly 19 years, I'm relatively new to the parking industry. Since Joining T2 Systems in 2007, my eyes have opened to the complexity and scale of modern parking. That said, one thing still baffles me. Why are there still so many facilities that don't accept credit cards? Don't get me wrong. I understand how hard it is to take credit cards when you're standing in a grass field that usually isn't used for parking. There are Parking Management Solutions for that (and T2 has one), but I'm not talking about grass fields. I'm talking about taking credit cards at parking facilities. Permanent lots or structures that already have gate arms and cashier booths.

A few years ago I got trapped (OK, so I wasn't trapped -- my car was) in an unattended garage because the paper currency acceptor was broken and I didn't have enough quarters in my pocket for an evening at an 80's video game arcade. I walked nearly a mile to get change. Not cool. More recently, I was parked in a downtown garage and found that I needed $20 in cash to exit. When parking is a buck or two for the day, I understand cash only, but $20 is a lot more then I spend on lunch and I always charge that.

Credit cards aren't the future. They're the present. Accepting credit cards doesn't have to be a pain. They can often be deployed as an extension to the Parking Permit Software and Garage Parking Solutions that you already have in place. T2 Flex has modules that handle credit cards as part of a total Parking Access and Revenue Control system. Accepting credit cards can lower costs for a facility, reduce involuntary profit sharing, and can make it parkers happier (or at least less frustrated).

As a part of the T2 Systems team, it isn't hard to guess that I have a bias for our solutions, but in writing this I'm also speaking as somebody that parks in these facilities. Nobody likes paying for parking (me included), but the less painful it is to pay, the better an experience parkers will have, and the more likely they are to come back to the same facility. I can assure you that's I know exactly which garage I got stuck in.

Happy parking.