Skip to main content
Industry

That’s the ticket: United Public Safety and Microsoft Azure

From its inception in 2012, Microsoft CityNext partner United Public Safety has delivered a simple yet powerful plea to municipal governments: stop handwriting parking tickets, buying servers and paying expensive consultants. Instead, reduce costs, create efficiencies, increase employee productivity and gain visibility into your department with UPsafety’s Azure-powered parking enforcement solution. 

Greater efficiencies, less expense, quick deployment

It’s a pitch that’s resonating with more and more cities and towns, universities, hospitals and private parking customers, according to Joan Young, UPsafety’s president: “With our solution, there isn’t a stiff financial barrier to entry in terms of our clients (needing) dedicated servers and consultants to set up those servers on site. The cloud has helped us immensely in breaking this barrier down by allowing us to offer the latest in industry tech at a price any department can afford.” Indeed, Young estimates UPsafety’s cloud-based solution is about half the cost of on premise competitor offerings.

In addition to avoiding the cost of procuring and maintaining servers and employing the IT personnel to support them, Young notes the significant speed and ease of implementing UPsafety’s parking enforcement solution. “We can easily set up a client within a 30-minute window,” she said. “Most of our clients are immensely impressed with how quickly we can get them up and running. They sign on one week, and we’re out there doing hands-on training the next.”

While greater government efficiency is the primary advantage of UPsafety solutions, Young says there’s also a key benefit for citizens: the convenience of doing everything online, from applying for permits to disputing tickets or paying parking fines.

The single best enforcement solution

UPsafety solutions are currently deployed in 28 states by approximately 120 clients, the majority of which are municipal governments, including Greenville, N.C., Hood River, Ore., Lancaster, Pa., Middleburg, Va., and York, Maine, to name just a few. “We handle the best main streets in small-town USA,” Young said. Nicolette James, finance director for Gettysburg, Pa., notes the value of UPsafety to her department: “United Public Safety has been our one-stop solution for managing parking enforcement, citations and parking permits in our very busy town. They provide a level of customer service that all companies should aspire to. Choosing the ToCite® system was one of the best decisions we’ve ever made.”

With more competitors rushing to capture the parking and code enforcement market, Young said UPsafety has refined its pitch to prospective customers: “It’s the single best enforcement solution in the market, combining an ultra-rugged mobile device with real-time data, Microsoft Azure cloud hosting, robust software that is field perfected and customized for each client’s unique requirements, the most comprehensive analytics suite in the industry—InCites™—and there’s no extra fee for our 24/7, 365 on-shore support.” There’s also UPsafety’s ability to integrate with almost all pay-to-park solutions, kiosk providers and more, allowing departments to create their optimum solution.  

Superior Azure tools

As an early adopter of the cloud for parking and code enforcement as well as moving vehicle e-citations, the Pennsylvania-based technology provider has partnered with Microsoft CityNext since 2012. Lead product manager Andrew Robin is one of the most gung-ho advocates for our trusted Azure platform. “The tools that were available to our developers through the Azure cloud were superior to what we found available in the marketplace,” he said, adding, “the support Microsoft offered was exceptional.” Lead solutions architect Mike Rubin also acknowledged the benefits of Microsoft’s cloud: “Azure enables our development team to focus on what they do best—creating great software. Azure has proven to be extremely reliable and automates tasks that would typically require a dedicated team”

CFO David Young credits Azure with empowering UPsafety’s “exceptionally robust system,” which allows clients to make changes quickly. “If a client wants a specific change—their processes have changed … they’re writing a lot more tickets, they brought on more officers, they need deeper analytics—we can easily scale that up,” he explained. “Everything in our system is so modular that absolutely any change that a municipality would need … we can do that in minutes.”

 

I’ve had the good fortune of visiting UPsafety’s headquarters near Philadelphia and seeing their solutions—and fun pillows—first hand. You can do the same at one of several upcoming trade show, such as the International Association of Police Chiefs Conference, Oct. 21-24, or by visiting: