 Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE. Covering Google Cloud Next 2018. Brought to you by Google Cloud and its ecosystem partners. Hey, welcome back everyone. This is theCUBE's live coverage. We're in San Francisco, California at Moscone South. For Google Cloud's big event called Next 2018, hashtag Google Next 18. I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante. Next is Paul Galef. He's the CEO of Smart Parking, customer of Google Cloud. Move from AWS, a variety of options, a very specific application, Smart Parking. I'm almost guessing what it is, but we'll let him explain. Paul, welcome to theCUBE. Hi, how do you do? Thanks for coming on. Okay, first take a minute to explain Smart Parking. What do you guys do? What's the layout? What's the product, service, infrastructure? Just give us a quick taste of what that looks like. So we are an Australian public listed organization on the Australian Securities Exchange. We essentially are a parking technology business, parking technology and services. We have two parts to our company. We, number one, technology. We design, build, install, maintain, in-ground parking sensor equipment. So this is really a smart city solution or IoT solution. This is where we put parking sensors in the ground in each parking space on the streets or in the garages, you have the red and green lights. And these sensors talk via a gateway through to the cloud in real time to provide information to the mobile phone to tell you how to get to a space and also allow you to pay. Or it can go to a sign, can go to other cloud-driven devices, business intelligence tools. Really a data product that allows you to manage your business. For a municipality, it can manage the streets more effectively. So is it like finding a spot that's open or paying for the spot that's open or? Both. So we're just deploying 3,000 sensors in the city of Adelaide in Australia, right? And this is where we put, again, sensors in the road across the city so people in real time can see on their phone. So whilst the phone's on the dashboard there, Google Maps and straight to an empty spot, but also when they get there, allow them to pay for that spot as well. So essentially what the client is getting, what the council municipality is getting is customers who've got much better experience of parking. And that's one of our core, our mantra is we want to reinvent the parking experience, right? Because it sucks, right? Your day starts and end with a parking event. We've all done a circle around the city. But for us, we really believe that providing people with that information in their hand to make a choice where they can park, yeah, rather than turning right at the block to go where they always go, where they know it's busy, turn left. You might be a one block away walk, but hey, it's a much better experience. I mean, with self-driving cars right around the corner is a great IOT solution for just car. Take me to the next nearest spot. It's absolutely right. You can almost envision that happening. And that's where I get, I mean, clearly as a listed business, I get asked by a lot of analysts, finance analysts, how is driverless cars going to disrupt your business? Well, if anything, it's going to accelerate. Oh, absolutely. Because the cars, we can talk directly to the car now and tell the car where to go, where to park, and where the open space is. Drop me off at the restaurant and go park yourself. Correct. That's about it, right? That's about it, right? Google AI kicking in right there. So you got a lot of Google strategic advantage here. Google Maps, which is highly accurate. You got the instrumentation of your solution, which is basically an IOT smart IOT device. And then you got scale and you got latency requirements. Low latency is super important to you. Is that something that attracted you to Google? Was that scale and low latency a big deal? Absolutely. I mean, latency is a big part of all the contracts that we execute. Yeah. One of the municipalities is really clear that when a car arrives or vacates from a spot, they want to know as quickly as possible that that event has happened. Okay. Because there's lots of things going on in that parking space. Because also the council, the municipality, looks at that space as an asset. Because of course it generates revenues. So when you pull up and park, you've got to pay, right? So the longer you're there, the more you pay. If you don't pay enough, guess what? Assets are not utilized. Yeah, assets are not utilized, but also a parking warden turns up, we'll give you a ticket, right? So we can help the council in the municipality with mobilizing their parking officers, we're giving them better information, right? As to where they can go. Increases revenue for the municipality because they know, okay, that car is about 10 minutes, about 10 minutes away, let's do a fly-by. Yeah, exactly. And that's the way it works. And that's the way the city should work. You've got to keep turning it over. It's because it's good for the retailers as well, because they want to see turnover of spots so they get more customers in their shops and so on and so forth. And all the data is processed in the cloud? That's it. So it's a pretty lightweight data model in terms of the volume of data. Are you not moving tons of video or pictures? No, in our UK business, we do a lot of video. We do a lot of number plate recognition. So we use, again, that data's going over the cloud and we capture images of plates regularly so we can get access to them from car parking, or car parking lots, parking lots. But really the information, the volume of data, if you think about any city, so we've got big installations, city-wide installations, three and a half, 4,000 centres in Westminster, the same in Wellington, New Zealand, Sydney, Melbourne, lots of counties around the world. Now, you're talking about when a car's arriving and leaving continually, that's a lot of transactions. But also the information that we're constantly processing in real time is what time did the car arrive? What time did the car leave? How long has the car been there? Has it paid? How long did it pay for? Does the car needs to be infringed? Do I need to mobilise an infringement officer? All that kind of information has to happen in real time. That's what Google Cloud allows us to do. But I mean, it's, correct me if I'm wrong, but it's relatively, you know, lots of small pieces of information that you can process in the cloud to deliver results in real time. And needs to be robust, okay? Because if you've taken an enforcement action against the car, then that needs to be legally enforceable and it's got to stand up in a court of law. So, time-stabbed, it's got to be correct. It's got to be accurate. So latency is really important, so speed. You know, so we can get information continually processed. But also then, accuracy is incredibly important. And are you using Google's standard network? We heard today about their premium network, or? I just, yeah, the standard network. So we moved, obviously we had our own process for a while. We had an experience with AWS, but also now with Google Cloud. And I guess what that allows us to do as I mentioned a moment ago is just the scale. You know, be able to deploy these city-wide installations. You know, thousands of IoT devices on the streets and also gateway devices on lampposts that are processing the information. The scale and the customer doesn't really see it. Just gets, you know, all this great data coming through. And they can then make educated business decisions of how many parking buildings do I need? Do I put the price up in a certain area of time? Do I put the price down to try and distribute demand? And that's how they kind of try and manage their assets, really. Surge, parking, pricing. That's exactly what it is. You know, it's coming. And that was the primary motivation for going to Google, was the scale, or you weren't able to scale with other clouds? Absolutely, with our previous, certainly with our own, I guess, comms server, if you like, that was a real challenge, the scale. And because we're growing, growing pretty quickly, you know, we've been in this, I guess in this marketplace, 15 years, deploying these types of solutions. But because we're growing significantly, the smart cities movement is really gaining momentum right now. So we've seen more customers come to us. So therefore we needed something more robust and something that can keep growing infinitely. And that's what cloud allows us. Talk about IoT Core from Google. How did that help you using that solution and how does that fit in? It's really, how does it help? Again, that the scale is the key thing and just the ability to develop quickly, all right? I mean, one of the real benefits is just the reporting functionality. I mean, our customers go crazy for reports, right? And having, you know, having to come back to us every week, every month, whatever, how about a report on X or how about a report on Y? Yeah, we give them the information, the data's there, they can query their own, yeah, essentially build their own reports, their own dashboard, their own tiles. It's a cool product, right? The final question for you, how has the Google Cloud changed your business? Is the business outlook stronger? What did it say? What's the hassle? What went away? What was the helper? What was the impact to you using Google Cloud? I guess, impact resilience is great. You know, we don't have the problems we used to have, we had a lot of bumps in the road with comm servers, you know, obviously costs, you pay for what you use, we're all having to buy a whole bunch of hardware that we did in the past. Again, the scale and the speed of deployment is really important. You know, our customers now were able to deploy thousands of these sensors, yeah. Yeah, the professional service still takes time of drilling a hole in the nuts and bolts, if you like, but the actual deployment of the software and what the customers see is important. You're up and running faster. Absolutely. So that's a key benefit, really. Huge, huge profit. The business benefit is no disruption to the service, faster times having it online, correct. And then they're reporting the scale beyond that. And that's it. And it's just the functionality of reporting that our customers love that. Ensuring they get, you know, because they're dealing with large sums of money, right? And if they can become more efficient, we can help them become more efficient by providing that information direct to their customers or to their enforcement officers or wherever it may be, then they're happy. And who do you like at the Melbourne Cup in November? Melbourne Cup. Ah, that's a good question. You get through the summer racing season, then we'll ask. Dave's got the, and Dave's handicapping horses already. It's only mid-season. Get ready for Saratoga. That's it. Paul, thanks for coming on the Cube. Appreciate the time. Always, thank you. And sharing your story. It's the Cube getting all the stories from the customers, from the executives, developers, you name it. We'll do whatever it takes to open up the data, share that content with you or rush in the Cube here, live in San Francisco. Stay with us for more coverage after this short break.