Kempinski Ajman
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The pandemic’s pause in commuting has put a temporary end to a second ire for many workers: parking.
But parking service provider ParkMobile has been busy as commuters worked from home during these early months of COVID-19, instead taking advantage of the downtime its business has been experiencing to accelerate its digital transformation to native infrastructure. of the cloud in the most cost-effective way. possible.
The Atlanta-based company, which began its digital transformation in 2018, began shifting its assets from an on-premises managed service provider to Amazon Web Services in mid-2020 as offices remained closed across the states. States – and the parking spaces remained empty.
According to Chris Salomon, its vice president of software and cloud engineering, what made ParkMobile’s approach unique was the set of technologies chosen from the start to quickly gain efficiency, including Amazon Elastic Cache, Amazon Aurora for MySQL and Postgres, Amazon Relational Database Service, and Amazon Managed Streaming for Kafka.
ParkMobile’s cloud transformation is now approximately 90% complete, with 80% cloud-native and 20% on-premises or managed service infrastructure, Salomon says.
“We’re less operations-focused” now because of the transformation, he says. “Instead of having people here looking at your databases 24/7, we’re actually leveraging the resources we get from AWS as managed services.
For example, ParkMobile has deployed many of the “well-architected patterns and pillars for user management and security published by AWS,” he says, noting benefits such as cost reduction and compliance. “We have good reference architectures that we follow because we need to be PCI compliant.”
The cloud has become something of a go-to strategy for many organizations throughout the pandemic, but ParkMobile was no stranger to the benefits of the model, Salomon says, noting that 90% of the tools ParkMobile relies on “are really through some kind of SaaS model”.
“We were prepared for this at the start of the pandemic,” he says. “Of course, we had a few hiccups along the way with everyone wanting to use the VPN at the same time. But even our tools that we use [internally] are managed tools,” including Atlassian’s suite, DataDog, JFrog Artifactory, and CircleCI.
ParkMobile is also using Yotascale to keep its cloud costs from spiraling out of control, an issue some companies face when transitioning.
“I come from a large company, so I’m very cost-conscious,” says Salomon. “What people complain about the cloud is that it’s too expensive. But obviously it has been proven otherwise. It just depends on how you, who you and what you move, and then whether you decide to go cloud native or not.
The digital return of parking
ParkMobile, like most companies, hit a wall when the pandemic disrupted business as usual in March 2020. But with the vaccine releasing most of the isolation at home, the company’s parking service has experienced a steady increase as retail and restaurant operations resume and some offices re-open.
Additionally, ParkMobile’s sales team is focused on selling its parking service to municipalities and universities and expanding to new geographies to increase revenue.
Next, ParkMobile collaborates with private garage operators and municipalities on IoT innovations, such as placing sensors on license plates and integrating cameras on electronic gates to automate its service to customers.
EasyPark, based in Stockholm, finalized in June its acquisition of ParkMobile, which employs 800 people. EasyPark has bought up competitors in Europe, and with ParkMobile it has added a presence in the United States, which is more car-centric than countries across the Atlantic.
Salomon says EasyPark is impressed with ParkMobile’s advanced state of digital transformation, which will not only drive growth, but make the company more attractive in the talent war.
“They are impressed with our position on our AWS infrastructure and how we focus on the business in some of our solutions. We are much more modern in our [technology] implementations than what they have there,” says Salomon, adding that the name of the US subsidiary will change to EasyPark but the new owners will give its US subsidiary autonomy and invest more in its digital goals.
The investment gives ParkMobile the means to hire more engineers in Atlanta, where Microsoft also has a development center. ParkMobile’s cloud-native infrastructure also makes it easier to attract employees, Salomon says.
“We lost a lot of people before the acquisition, but we’re getting a lot back, which is very surprising,” he says. “We’re close to cutting-edge, even cutting-edge, and engineers like to work on shiny new things.”
ParkMobile recognizes that the current hybrid enterprise business model – in which many knowledge workers continue to work remotely – is not helping its bottom line. But Salomon and others point out that the return of rush hour is inevitable in many US cities, such as Boston, San Francisco and Atlanta. Automobile use and the need for parking will only increase as citizens resume shopping, dining out, attending sporting events and going to places of entertainment.
According to Salomon, ParkMobile’s biggest challenge is getting municipalities to put more modern payment hardware on the streets and convincing garage owners to remove kiosks and implement ParkMobile’s sensors and apps to make the process easier. fully automated parking lot for drivers.
“I can’t speak 30 or 50 years from now when we’ll have advanced technology and we won’t need cars anymore, or we’ll be driven by self-driving cars,” Salomon says. “But I don’t think the need for parking is going away anytime soon.”
