While most of us think about finding a parking spot in urban areas as, at best, a small annoyance, the advent of the internet of things and the “smart city” concept to generate data is leading to better solutions for those who are looking to park their cars. Interestingly enough, this same data is also helping cities and municipalities to better plan for and glean revenue from parking spots, which they think of as revenue generators.

Smart Parking Ltd, a company operating in New Zealand, Australia and the UK, uses real-time vehicle parking event sensor technology to track all of the information about a particular parking spot. Such information could include whether a spot is vacant or occupied, how long a vehicle has occupied the spot, and how much it costs to park there. A user can access this data on an app, via their smartphone, and chose a parking spot based on what the app is telling them.

“People in real time can see on their phone — whilst the phone’s on the dashboard — they can Google [the] map and [go] straight to an empty spot,” said Paul Gillespie (pictured), chief executive officer of Smart Parking. “When they get there, [the app] allows them to pay for that spot as well.”

Gillespie spoke with John Furrier (@furrier) and Dave Vellante (@dvellante), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Google Cloud Next event in San Francisco. In addition to the future of parking, they spoke about the reasons why Smart Parking chose Google Cloud for its business. (* Disclosure below.)

A challenge of data scale and latency

Initially, SmartParking ran its processes on-premises, and then it used Amazon Web Services Inc. for a while. The company found that to deliver to the scale it needed — to capture the data from thousands of IoT devices — they needed a partner who could help them scale up.

Additionally, the continuous flow of information that comes in from the sensors on the IoT requires low latency. Not only do people looking for parking need to know information about the parking spot, the municipalities that own the spot need to know in real time when a vehicle enters or leaves it.

“Because we’re growing significantly, [and] the smart cities movement is really gaining momentum right now … we needed something more robust and something that can keep growing infinitely, and that’s what the cloud allows us,” Gillespie concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Google Cloud Next event. (* Disclosure: Google Cloud sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Google Cloud nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE