Until recently, parking attendants had a tough time patrolling the streets of Amsterdam. They’d meet aggressive – sometimes violent – reactions from ticketed drivers. That put a serious strain on their health, resulting in high absenteeism.
Now, thanks to digital technology, traffic wardens in Amsterdam don’t have to stalk the sidewalks anymore. Instead, they ride vehicles with SCANaCAR systems from ScanAuto, which monitor parked cars, taking up to 800 digital images a second. The digital images are encrypted and sent to Egis for analysis.
All of that data handling uses BT’s infrastructure.
Jan Lukkien, IT manager at Egis Parking Services, explains; “Using the BT infrastructure, our software looks up the licence plate on Egis and government databases to check if the owner has the correct parking permit for the zone the vehicle is in.”
Originally managed through a city-owned entity, Amsterdam was keen to get greater efficiency by outsourcing the operation. The bid winner was French engineering group, Egis. An IT service provider reselection process run by Egis, resulted in the reappointment of BT.
BT was already engaged, but that didn’t make it an automatic choice. Against other suppliers, it was able to demonstrate that the BT Compute hosting platform in Amsterdam was easily up to the task.
“We needed a stable IT platform because we run a virtually 24/7 operation, scanning about 40-million licence plates a year,” Jan Lukkien adds.
Leonard Knijff, business development manager with BT in the Netherlands, says: “The tailored solution we’ve build for Egis is extremely reliable and will help Egis market its end-to-end parking solution to other cities in The Netherlands, and elsewhere around the globe.”
“We’d like to build a long-term relationship and we see from BT the same positive attitude as us when it comes to how to treat its customers,” concludes Carlo Barten, CEO of Egis.
