Parking in the Cloud

If you've seen my previous posts (and I'm all but certain you've been waiting for my next one with baited breath, dear reader) you'll know that I'm the lead Analyst for our Hosting Environment.  I play with servers, networking gear, enterprise storage, security systems, compliance, firewalls, and complicated software.  I like blinking lights on equipment, play way too much video games, stood in line for every midnight showing of Star Wars, and have seen every episode of Star Trek (yes, all different flavors) at least twice.  I'm a geek to the core.

And last week, T2 let me go mingle and talk to customers.  Can you beleive that?  Based on my stereotype, they should have me somewhere hidden in the back corners of the office, occasionally feeding me mountain dew and pizza..  

I kid, I kid though - this was my fourth User Group, and every year they just keep getting better.  I have the privlege of meeting up with the customers that use the solutions my team hosts and strives to keep available 24/7.  Every piece of network gear, every new blinking light or state of the art server - and every report I fill out in the name of compliance - all has a face behind it.  At User Group, I get to do what few geeks really get to do in their lifetime with a company - meet, mingle, and drink good beer with the customers that utilize the stuff I live and breathe.  

It's a fascinating prospect, really - when you think of it - geek meets customer. Customer meets geek. Customer doesn't run away. Geek leaves User Group even more amped up to do his best to push the envelope of service in T2's Hosting Product.  Seriously, though, it was great meeting new people, and shaking hands and exchanging a beer with the familiar faces of our wonderful customers was great.

Until next year - I'll stay geeky - you keep the world parking.  Things work well that way.

- Grant

I was at T2’s Datacenter the other night, staring at the symphony of blinking lights of the servers and network equipment that make up the Hosting Environment.  In this environment, we host over 160 customer’s parking operations.  To the customer, it’s an application like no other in the industry – allowing a true Unified parking solution with a plethora of business and industry-centric features wrapped around fantastic support and performance.

To me, at the core, it’s a combination of cutting edge servers and equipment transmitting billions upon billions of ones and zeroes, all utilizing amazing technology from top vendors and producing powerful results.

Sound like a lot of adjectives and overly descriptive? Let me simplify it even for myself. The famous science fiction writer and scientist Arthur C. Clarke once said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”  I think that’s a great description of what T2 and other companies living in the technology cloud do every day – deliver magic.  Behind the scenes of the Flex Web Page customers' back offices access, or the eBusiness webpage utilized by your customers, are some of the most amazing pieces of technology all working in efficient harmony to process, store, transmit and keep secure your valuable business data. 

I’ve been at T2 for several years and have watched the environment grow from infancy to a powerful showplace of what a Private Cloud really is and should be (there’s an inside joke in the T2 Hosting Team – “we were in the cloud before the cloud was cool.”)  In my line of work, Information Technology, it’s so easy to get caught up in the technical details and live and breathe the infrastructure that sometimes, you seem to  forget what your technology is actually providing: solutions to businesses that are run by real people with real needs and real expectations.

And to me, that’s what my job and my coworkers are all about. We take the technical tools and infrastructure and morph and model it into an efficient machine and service that allows our customer’s to excel at their industry – parking management.  We’re proud of our results and of our systems, and we take pride in our offerings.

So what does all this mean to me, the Analyst of T2’s Hosting Team? My goal is simple: the next time you sell a Permit online, look up a citation across a complex system using an advanced query, or monitor your garage from a webpage… and someone asks you – “Hey, how does all that work?”

You can respond, “I’m not sure – I suppose’ it’s a little bit of magic.”