Ocra, previously ParkPlace, announces the launch of a new corporate identity and welcomes Chris Everton to its executive team as Vice President of Product & Partnerships.
A parking industry veteran with 14 years of experience – most recently leading ecommerce and third-party revenue generation at Towne Park, one of the nation’s most prominent parking operators – Everton brings his expertise in using technology to build profitable, scalable, and innovative partnerships with online sellers and consumer parking marketplaces to mutually grow revenue.
Ocra is the parking industry’s first omni-channel management platform for parking operators – a true one-stop shop for automating rate and inventory adjustments, blackouts, and reporting across all sales channels.
Ocra’s single sign-on functionality eliminates the need for parking operators to log into individual seller portals for day-to-day operations, providing a real-time overview of transactions and occupancy across their entire portfolio. Via flexible bi-directional integrations, operators can add a new sales channel in under ten minutes, syncing activity between Ocra and the seller portal for up-to-the-minute insights.
“The name ‘Ocra’ is meaningful to our team and will sound familiar to our early partners and backers, as well,” says Ethan Glass, CEO & Co-founder. “The first ever solution we built for parking operators was called ‘One-Click Rate Adjustment’ – or, for short, ‘OCRA’. “Over the past year, our platform has grown tremendously, but the name ‘Ocra’ reflects our mission: empathy through interaction. We aren’t simply engineers building for operators; we were operators ourselves prior to building the original OCRA.
Glass continues, “Like our clients, we were in the field every day. We know where the operational inefficiencies and revenue opportunities exist, and we know how to build technologies to address them. Bringing on Chris Everton to help us continue that mission is the next natural step in our growth.”
“Online sales channels represent a significant revenue opportunity for parking operators and asset owners,” says Chris Everton, former Director of Ecommerce at Towne Park and new Vice President of Product & Partnerships at Ocra. “But scaling this type of program presents an enormous challenge, due largely to every channel having its own online portal for controls. It’s extremely inefficient to change rates and adjust inventory availability within each portal in real time, which is what operators need to do in order to avoid overselling and maximize revenue per available space.”
According to Everton, “There’s nothing else out there like Ocra right now. It’s unmatched in its operational efficiency and productivity features. It’s truly a one-stop shop for strategic management.”
The Ocra platform is available on a flexible subscription basis for the full suite or A La Carte so that parking operators can create their own custom suite of features, all centralized in one online portal behind a single set of log-in credentials. These features include Rate Parity, Automated Blackouts, Event Parking Management, Universal Inventory, Advanced Permissioning, and more.
To learn more about Ocra’s platform and recent corporate developments, visit getocra.com or contact Ethan Glass, CEO & Co-founder, at ethan@getocra.com.
