Fail-safe Intercom servers for top-class parking provider Q-Park

Since Dutch-based high-quality parking provider Q-Park opened its gates to the parking public in 1998, the cliché of the commercial car park as a dull, lifeless concrete bunker is a thing of the past. Instead of drab concrete walls, motorists are greeted by a stylish architecture and bright, open spaces, complemented by first-class customer service.

With their new concept, Q-Park has been setting standards that have earned it great approval ratings and excellent market success: currently more than 5,000 Q-Park facilities offer first-rate parking all throughout Europe.

True to the motto, “communication makes the customer service”, Commend’s largest installed Intercom system to date has been serving the top-class Call Centre of Q-Park’s central operations in Maastricht with fittingly high-classed Intercom connections for more than ten years. This is where all customer call lines from entry/exit gates gates and pay stations of 400 Q-Park facilities all over the country converge. Here they are distributed via WAN connections and processed at the facility’s 33 control stations.

At the beginning of this year it became obvious that the healthy growth of Q-Park’s car park network made it necessary to expand fail safety for their business critical Intercom connections. The key challenge was to ensure that call processing had to continue uninterrupted even in case of technical faults such as a server failure. To achieve this, the Commend team worked out a detailed catalogue of fail-over strategies, which covers 22 possible failure scenarios. The strategies define how the Intercom system can ‘self-heal’ automatically by instantly switching over to the newly installed backup system to keep the call lines going. Thanks to the sophisticated solution with its extremely short switchover times, even a critical server failure are hardly noticeable at the Call Centre.

As part of the system upgrade, 16 new GE-800 Intercom Server were installed, three of which serve as main work stations, with 13 being used as regional Intercom data centres for backup purposes.

For call centre staff, the new solution is a dream come true: they no longer need to take care of server connectivity so they can take care of callers.

About Commend

Commend develops and manufactures Security and Communication systems for protection of people, buildings and values. The Commend International GmbH was founded in 1971 and is one of the world’s largest providers of Intercom Systems.

Currently about 150 employees are stationed in the headquarters in Salzburg; in the international partner network about 350 people are working together. The annual turnover 2012 was about €55 Mill., export rate 95%.