Sarah Becherer (our VP of “Parketing”) got a terrific question recently regarding how we use the word “rails” on our website and announcements.
As in: “Ocra’s Partner API runs on our rails”.
While it’s true that we keep her around for her sparkling personality and bottomless well of parking-related puns, ultimately what she’s here to accomplish with our marketing is being helpful and intentional about presenting info and data in ways that illuminate, educate, and are all-around useful.
So, today, we introduce…
New Series: Developer Stuff For The Rest Of Us!
For your team, from ours!
As one of the non-developers in a company full of engineering & product virtuosos, Sarah often poses questions like this to our team, which they are happy to answer.
In this series, she’ll flex that helpfulness muscle to break down engineering concepts as they relate to Ocra, the parking industry, and tech in general.
Today’s Installment: What are “Ocra rails”, anyway?
First off: rails = APIs.
Next up, the context:
Say you want to…
1) use one or more of Ocra’s solutions, like rate controls, inventory management, centralized reporting, all that good stuff; or
2) access Ocra’s centralized data for multiple demand channels/aggregators
However, you don’t want to do so by logging directly into Ocra’s web console with your Ocra username and password.
You want to log into your own platform and use Ocra’s solutions and/or access our data from there.
In this case…
You can use our “rails” (AKA our APIs) to access the data in Ocra and pull or push back and forth between our system and yours.
Essentially, we allow you to create your own front end (in *your* web console/platform) and use our back end if you don’t wanna use the Ocra front end (*our* web console/platform).
You can make the data look like what you need it to look like, and the data comes from Ocra!
Now for a use case:
Ocra <> Parker Technology!
When a driver pushes the call button with a reservation-related problem, Parker Technology reps can see data about the driver’s reservation *within* the Parker platform because Ocra is pushing that data to them via our rails.
We build lots of integrations like this one; you can see the full list here.
Any other topics that Ocra talks about on our website, LinkedIn, blog, panels, etc. about that you’d like a non-dev download on?
Drop Sarah a line! It’s sarah@getocra.com.
