National Car Parks Selects ClearCube Technology to Avoid Critical Downtime and Keep Its Facilities Fully Operational
ClearCube Technology, the market leader in centralized computing solutions, announced that National Car Parks (NCP), the UK's leading car park management firm, has deployed a solution from ClearCube to manage its new car park control room and customer service center in Croydon, UK.
With ClearCube's technology, this facility, which will manage up to 600 car parking sites across the UK, will benefit from the security, high availability and operational benefits of a centralised computing architecture including 99.9-percent uptime. Working with ClearCube partner Bladetec, a solution was devised to host the independent systems on separate PC blades that could switch instantaneously.
NCP has unified its regional control centres into a single nationwide, state of the art control room. A critical factor of this consolidation was insuring the uptime of the control room in order for NCP to continue to deliver the best customer service for parking in the country. Now five separate and redundant IT infrastructure systems are provisioned to each control room operator. In the event of a software or hardware failure the position is put back to full use within five minutes.
The centralisation of the NCP's customer service and control centre has enabled the organisation to implement a best-fit solution for a modern command and control environment. ClearCube's powerful Sentral management forms the core of the NCP solution. The software provides NCP IT administrators with visibility and control of local and remote computing deployments. In addition to simplifying deployment management, the software delivers proven security, disaster recovery and cost reduction benefits. Sentral offers IT administrators unique capabilities like dynamic resource allocation, virtual desktop management, active health monitoring, and PC blade switching & sparing. Sentral can also be leveraged to support virtualised desktops as well as other vendors' blade systems.
"Before the Croydon Operations Centre, NCP operated seven satellite centres around the UK to control its car parks," commented Neil Robson, technology director at NCP. "The transition to a centralised environment has provided NCP with a highly adaptable computing solution that gives us 100 percent systems availability and significantly simplified IT management. Most importantly, the architecture allows NCP to exceed our already tight goals for superior customer service."
"IT failures can disrupt the level of service provided by customer-facing organisations particularly in our competitive industry," continued Robson. "NCP's customers expect the highest level of service, so any IT failure for us is totally unacceptable. Our move to a centralised blade solution means in the event of any hardware or software failures, operators simply switch to spare PC blades with a few clicks in Sentral and continue operations. This ability has really raised the bar for NCP's world class customer service."
The Croydon control centre hosts 16 controllers who are able to manage all of NCP's car parks in the UK; overseeing security, payment and customer services operations from one contact point. Close Circuit Television (CCTV) at each car park is relayed back to secure operations, while the payments system is linked to all ticket barriers and payment machines. The high integration of all car park operations allows NCP operators to connect directly to any barrier in any car park with video and voice-feeds to discuss customer inquiries all in real-time. Operators can query payments and resolve customer incidents in seconds.
"NCP is another example of a forward thinking organisation looking to benefit from new technology to drive down operational costs and increase their levels of customer satisfaction," said John Kingdon managing director of Bladetec. "ClearCube's centralised computing technology is unique in allowing us to use our design expertise to build the solution required by NCP to improve their business."
"This is another world-class example of a leading enterprise adopting our centralised computing platform to gain unparalleled reliability, security and flexibility," said Bruce Cohen, president and CEO of ClearCube. "With our technology, NCP has created an operations centre that is able to deliver exemplary customer service."
NCP has unified its regional control centres into a single nationwide, state of the art control room. A critical factor of this consolidation was insuring the uptime of the control room in order for NCP to continue to deliver the best customer service for parking in the country. Now five separate and redundant IT infrastructure systems are provisioned to each control room operator. In the event of a software or hardware failure the position is put back to full use within five minutes.
The centralisation of the NCP's customer service and control centre has enabled the organisation to implement a best-fit solution for a modern command and control environment. ClearCube's powerful Sentral management forms the core of the NCP solution. The software provides NCP IT administrators with visibility and control of local and remote computing deployments. In addition to simplifying deployment management, the software delivers proven security, disaster recovery and cost reduction benefits. Sentral offers IT administrators unique capabilities like dynamic resource allocation, virtual desktop management, active health monitoring, and PC blade switching & sparing. Sentral can also be leveraged to support virtualised desktops as well as other vendors' blade systems.
"Before the Croydon Operations Centre, NCP operated seven satellite centres around the UK to control its car parks," commented Neil Robson, technology director at NCP. "The transition to a centralised environment has provided NCP with a highly adaptable computing solution that gives us 100 percent systems availability and significantly simplified IT management. Most importantly, the architecture allows NCP to exceed our already tight goals for superior customer service."
"IT failures can disrupt the level of service provided by customer-facing organisations particularly in our competitive industry," continued Robson. "NCP's customers expect the highest level of service, so any IT failure for us is totally unacceptable. Our move to a centralised blade solution means in the event of any hardware or software failures, operators simply switch to spare PC blades with a few clicks in Sentral and continue operations. This ability has really raised the bar for NCP's world class customer service."
The Croydon control centre hosts 16 controllers who are able to manage all of NCP's car parks in the UK; overseeing security, payment and customer services operations from one contact point. Close Circuit Television (CCTV) at each car park is relayed back to secure operations, while the payments system is linked to all ticket barriers and payment machines. The high integration of all car park operations allows NCP operators to connect directly to any barrier in any car park with video and voice-feeds to discuss customer inquiries all in real-time. Operators can query payments and resolve customer incidents in seconds.
"NCP is another example of a forward thinking organisation looking to benefit from new technology to drive down operational costs and increase their levels of customer satisfaction," said John Kingdon managing director of Bladetec. "ClearCube's centralised computing technology is unique in allowing us to use our design expertise to build the solution required by NCP to improve their business."
"This is another world-class example of a leading enterprise adopting our centralised computing platform to gain unparalleled reliability, security and flexibility," said Bruce Cohen, president and CEO of ClearCube. "With our technology, NCP has created an operations centre that is able to deliver exemplary customer service."
About NCP
NCP is the highest profile name in parking and traffic management in the UK. With more than 800 car parks, NCP provides a range of services including car park management, airport parking, and consultancy for the design, build and maintenance of car parks.
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