Park Place Marks Major Innovations Since Entuity Acquisition

Park Place Professional Services


Case Allin August 05, 2020

A year may pass quickly, but the Entuity integration has demonstrated how much progress may be packed in 365 days.

As anyone tuned in to the global events of the past year may attest, a year can seem to fly by faster than you can say, “a new normal.” In August 2019, Park Place Technologies announced the acquisition of Entuity, a global network performance monitoring software company. A year may pass quickly, but the Entuity integration has demonstrated how much progress may be packed in 365 days.

In the acquisition announcement, Chris Adams, President and CEO, Park Place Technologies, was quoted as saying, “When Entuity is integrated with our award-winning ParkView™ monitoring product, we will deliver enhanced network visibility, driving uptime for our global customer base.”

As the one-year anniversary of the ParkView/Entuity acquisition arrives, those words have been proven prophetic.

Entuity was Park Place’s 12th acquisition since 2016, and while every acquisition is strategic and benefits clients, Entuity has proven to be a game changer that led to the creation of a new technology category (more on that in a moment).

For more than 20 years, Entuity has focused on network performance monitoring to ensure uninterrupted service delivery. Entuity provides the analytics needed to keep networks performing and visibility into issues before they impact business services. Entuity was seen as a perfect complement to Park Place Technologies as both organizations were customer-centric, have a deep-seated commitment to their employees and are laser-focused on maximizing customer Uptime.

Here are some of the Entuity highlights of the past 12 months:

New 2020 Product Releases

Entuity Network Analytics has maintained its momentum of helping businesses move ahead in a changing IT environment. With its major product release in January and two subsequent releases, ENA delivers innovative ways for IT organizations to add more automation, network visibility, and management to ensure optimum network performance and end-user productivity.

Key 2020 enhancements include:

  • Geographical Maps integrated with Google Maps provide better visibility to what’s happening on the network, what sites are impacted for faster problem resolution
  • SurePath Application Path Monitoring permits monitoring of network performance out to applications, whether hosted within the customers infrastructure or in the cloud. This allows administrators to quickly identify end user experience and which node the issue resides on, whether it is on the customers network, with the internet service provider or in the cloud.
  • VPN and capacity planning capabilities were expanded in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic to include more proactive management features so IT can easily ensure “Work from Home” employees are just as productive at home as they were in the office.
  • A new BMC Helix Integration affords BMC customers moving to the cloud a way to include network events and data into Helix. Adding ENA to BMC Helix saves time in troubleshooting events with improved single pane of glass visibility.

People Impact

The Entuity acquisition has led to many more “feet on the street” in support of customers with the hiring of additional professional technical staff, development staff, and account representatives. The investment in staff has helped handle an increase in the number of client requests for proof of concept and discovery sessions, and new, robust technologies being developed for integration into the Park Place ParkView portfolio. This allows us to maintain the high level of customer service as the customer base continues to grow.

ENA in the News

The technology media has noticed! Scores of articles have been published on the Park Place acquisition of Entuity, including feature stories in Network Computing, “Network Monitoring and Management Turned Upside Down”; Data Economy, “You can’t manage what you can’t see”; and SC Media “Are you treating your data center like a game of Risk?”

In the Case Study, “Putting a Different Spin on Network Management,” Grundfos Pumps, one of the world’s largest manufacturers of water pumps and water systems for both commercial and home use, testified to the benefits of ENA.

Fred Wiest, Network Engineer and Global Network Architect at Grundfos, said, “ENA’s Configuration Management functionality offers us extensive capabilities to really simplify configuring our network. We are a lot more efficient in handling new roll out deployments and can see any changes immediately before it impacts performance. For example, we can set up a virtual router in Azure in less than 5 minutes. We configure SNMP, add it to ENA, hit a button and the router is automatically configured to our specifications in the Azure cloud.”

DMSO

As mentioned earlier, the integration of Entuity into Park Place led to the creation of a new technology category, DMSO (Discover, Monitor, Support, Optimize). Park Place’s aggregated service delivery platform monitors and remediates hardware, networks, operating systems and applications. Entuity Network Analytics adds new depth and breadth and demonstrates a commitment to advancing DMSO and the future of efficiently managing a diverse digital infrastructure.

The July 2020 release of ParkView Network Analytics (PVNA) is testament to this DMSO strategy.  Built on ENA technology, PVNA is a hosted network management service designed for small to medium sized businesses.  As a hosted service, SMBs will be able to take advantage of a proven, intelligent network analytics fit and gain almost immediate ROI.

Park Place, in consultation with industry analysts and Park Place customers, leveraged more than three decades of insight gained from supporting 17,000 customers in 58,000 data centers to develop DMSO to provide comprehensive infrastructure control and visibility. Through a single pane of glass, DMSO, which incorporates Entuity software, will offer a view up and down the technology stack, including hardware, operating systems, networks, databases, applications, and the cloud, for customers to:

  • Discover – Holistic, accurate listing of data center assets across OEMs, with automated IT Asset Discovery, Application Dependency Mapping and comprehensive coverage of Servers (Physical, Virtual, and Cloud) Desktops, Edge Devices and Peripherals;
  • Monitor – Server, storage and network hardware monitoring and software monitoring (OS, Linux, Windows, VM and Applications);
  • Support – Hardware (storage, server, network) maintenance with access to world class engineers in under 4 hours. Assisted event remediation for Hardware, Operating Systems and Network Hardware (Predictive/Proactive alerting and ticket integration) OS Remediation (Patch Management, Updates) and Network Incidents (Management, Configuration, Root Cause);
  • Optimize – Enable client efficiencies and ensure Uptime with Capacity Management, Cloud cost controls, and employ AI to identity opportunities for infrastructure optimization.

“Data centers have changed, and the concept of infrastructure continues to evolve radically as businesses move to implement digital transformation in its many forms,” said Chris Adams, CEO of Park Place Technologies. “This requires a more strategic approach to maintain physical and virtual infrastructures and gain insights through automation and analytics. This is the genesis of DMSO and we are confident that it represents a new way to deliver value and help transform critical infrastructure into a strategic business asset.”

As Entuity further integrates into Park Place, expect this next year to fly by just as quickly — and to bring many more innovations to DMSO.

About the Author

Case Allin, Senior Director of Sales, ParkView & Entuity