- Published on
You talk about parking and peoples eyes glaze over, but once you get into parking you begin to appreciate there’s layers of complexity to parking. My name is Brian Wolff, I’m the President and CEO of Parker Technology and I’ve been with Parker almost 8 years. I joined in January of 2016.
What does Parker Do?
Parker is a software and services company dedicated to helping people get out of parking garages. 20 years ago, when parking operators removed cashiers from the lanes, they actually replaced them with machines that have help buttons. If you press a help button in nearly 900 facilities in the U.S. in the 46 states, you will get Parker’s call center. We have also developed the software platform underneath, so there are other parking operators that use our software to take calls in their own call center. What makes our software a little bit unique is that we own patents for two-way video. So if you see two-way video in the United States, you’re guaranteed that it is Parker Technology underneath.
Share the History of Parker Technology
Very early on some of the founding fathers if you will of Parker Technology, even before my time, conceived of the idea that once the cashiers were removed from the lanes, thought about putting the cashiers back in the lane virtually, which was a brilliant idea. The filed patents on that and the platform itself went through a few different iterations. We changed over to generation four, which is the platform that Leaf Software built for Parker.
We were taking 55,000 calls at that time a month and today we take 161,000 calls a month on our platform. The Technology has become critical to obviously our business, but also to our customers as we continue to move through the digital transformation of parking.
We knew that there needed to be a fourth generation. Generation three was built purposefully as a MVP (Minimal Viable Product) and an island. It didn’t talk to anything, it was a self-contained system which at the time was good for it because any of the machines or parking equipment out there didn’t talk to the outside world. But we knew as parking was going through a digital transformation we knew that our platform was going to have to be extensible and was going to have to talk to other platforms.
We were taking 55,000 calls at that time a month and today we take 161,000 calls a month on our platform. The Technology has become critical to obviously our business, but also to our customers as we continue to move through the digital transformation of parking.
We knew that there needed to be a fourth generation. Generation three was built purposefully as a MVP (Minimal Viable Product) and an island. It didn’t talk to anything, it was a self-contained system which at the time was good for it because any of the machines or parking equipment out there didn’t talk to the outside world. But we knew as parking was going through a digital transformation we knew that our platform was going to have to be extensible and was going to have to talk to other platforms.
Share your experience working with Leaf
Our experience with Leaf has been nothing but awesome from the get-go. When I think about high integrity, when I think about high quality, when I think about good people, smart, talented engineers - all of those would describe Leaf. The product speaks for itself, I mean the platform has tripled or quadrupled in its time and is still scalable. We’re working on Gen. five as we speak. We’ve been thrilled with Leaf. They’ve given us tremendous flexibility and given us the ability to grow our platform and the capabilities to grow without having to add engineers ourself which has been really valuable to us from a flexibility perspective and even from a bottom-line perspective as well.
What challenges are you facing?
One of the hardest things about parking is that it’s going through a digital transformation itself, just like technology did in the early 2000’s and just trying to keep up with that technology. To push the industry forward to be innovative and thoughtful about how platforms get connected, we believe is the future, so we’re going to continue to build a connected platform. Eventually we will be part of sort of the ‘hub and spoke’ systems of a connected parking experience for the parking stakeholders and Leaf will be in the center of that as far as I can see.
Share a benefit working with Leaf
We’ve had the ability to sort of flex the staff while we’re building different pieces and that kind of flexibility is really hard to do when you have full time FTE’s (Full Time Employees). Which is again one of the advantages of going with Leaf to give us the bench that we need and also give us the capabilities we need and forward thinking technology that it takes to be competitive in parking or any other industry for that matter.
What are your future plans?
Our plans are to continue to grow and I think Leaf will be critical piece of that because we’ll move from Gen. four to Gen. five which will cause us to build different capabilities including things like artificial intelligence, machine learning. We’re going have to continue to connect our platform to different parking platforms because we see Parker being an integral part of the parking experience. In order to deliver a great customer experience, we have to be able to talk to the different parking stakeholders. The only way we con do that is through the technology and connecting the platforms which a part of our strategy.
I’m on a bit of a mission myself to spread the word that parking is actually a lot harder than it looks. We’ve started a blog, it’s called “Harder than it looks, Parking Uncovered.” As many people as I can share, that I didn’t understand when I got here seven and a half years ago how hard parking was. Everyone thinks, you know you pull into a garage, you park your car, you leave, you pay. The fact is that parking is really complex, so if you want to listen to the podcast, you certainly can. I’d love to talk to anyone that would love to talk about parking, as boring as that sounds, if they have questions about parking, I’m happy to help them.
I’m on a bit of a mission myself to spread the word that parking is actually a lot harder than it looks. We’ve started a blog, it’s called “Harder than it looks, Parking Uncovered.” As many people as I can share, that I didn’t understand when I got here seven and a half years ago how hard parking was. Everyone thinks, you know you pull into a garage, you park your car, you leave, you pay. The fact is that parking is really complex, so if you want to listen to the podcast, you certainly can. I’d love to talk to anyone that would love to talk about parking, as boring as that sounds, if they have questions about parking, I’m happy to help them.
0 Comments