2021 Year in Review

Park Place Hardware Maintenance


Jennifer Deutsch December 21, 2021

Park Place ‘s Busy 2021 Builds Foundation for 2022 … and Beyond

As the global economy struggled with COVID-19 variants and a redefinition of the traditional workplace, Park Place Technologies continued its growth through a strategic blend of innovation, organic sales and acquisitions. Here is a look back at our 2021, with a steady eye on the future.

Growth through Acquisitions

In November 2020, Park Place acquired Curvature, an IT support, products and services company. The acquisition nearly doubled our employee count, extended our global reach, greatly expanded our Professional Services offerings and entered us into the new, refurbished and Curvature branded hardware business. By May 3 this year, all Curvature clients were migrated to Park Place. The migration included transferring contracts and account information from Curvature’s systems to Park Place’s systems, as well as combining the two companies’ operational processes and supply chains. This acquisition allows us to better support our customers with additional engineering expertise, new service offerings, and the addition of Curvature Hardware.

Curvature’s hardware sales business is a Park Place company that retains its brand and sales website

In September, Park Place announced two more acquisitions.

First, we announced the asset acquisition of a new inventory and logistics management solution, NetSure+, developed by Charlotte, NC,-based SiteGrid. SiteGrid CEO Brett Ganey and his team of networking experts have joined the Park Place family.

NetSure+ combines an inventory management and sparing solution with Park Place’s networking maintenance services to deliver a low-cost, superior customer experience. By coupling customer-entitled spares with NetSure+ logistics capabilities and Park Place’s global footprint, customers will have access to a service not available via traditional maintenance programs. Park Place’s OEM-compliant NetSure+ analytics and reporting functionality gives customers visibility to inventory levels, sparing compliance, warranty processing and consumption information in one location. By adding capabilities for customer-owned inventory, Park Place will offer customers an OEM-compliant service to OEM maintenance support with TPM-level savings.

“As Park Place expands its unique portfolio of services to incorporate nearly every element of managing IT infrastructure, we want to provide more customizable options for our clients,” said Chris Adams, Park Place President and CEO. “NetSure+ will help our customers optimize their maintenance spend and ensure the economic viability of support and sparing systems. We have partnered with SiteGrid for the past year and deployed this solution to many of our customers, so we know this acquisition is a win-win.”

Next was the acquisition of specific assets of Congruity360. Congruity360 provides global, vendor-agnostic, IT Management services. Park Place acquired Congruity360’s third-party maintenance business, data migration services businesses and new hardware sales offerings. Congruity360 will maintain ownership of its information governance and software business.

“When we acquired Curvature in 2020, it greatly strengthened Park Place’s hardware maintenance and professional services capabilities,” said Chris Adams. “Congruity360 mirrors that model with a nice slate of maintenance clients and a dynamic and growing data migration business that will add another layer to our professional services capabilities,”

Product/Service Innovations

2021 was a busy year for Park Place innovation. Here a few of this year’s new offerings.

In February, we debuted an industry-exclusive: The First-Time Fix™ Guarantee. Under the program, if a return trip is needed to correct the same issue on the same device serial number within five days, clients will be credited for one month of maintenance and ParkView monitoring on that device.  The First-Time Fix™ Guarantee is free as part of a Park Place maintenance contract when devices are supported by the company’s ParkView Hardware Monitoring™.

In March, we announced ParkView Server Management™, which offers the tools and expertise to support IT hybrid infrastructure: physical, virtual and cloud technologies. The service, delivered by our Enterprise Operations Center (EOC), streamlines IT operations by simplifying the management of compute environments and provides clients with incident management, patch management and remediation. With ParkView Server Management™, Park Place can now monitor and maintain the hardware and software components of servers virtually anywhere – streamlining monitoring and support solutions for customers. 

In April, we announced Entuity innovations to further simplify network performance and diagnostic monitoring. The new software package offers a newly built Asset Management functionality, enhanced Discovery, new server and storage device monitoring and OS monitoring capabilities on Windows and Linux. These new features build on the award-winning enterprise network monitoring and management solution.

In September, Park Place strengthened its data center Professional Services portfolio with offerings bolstered by the November 2020 acquisition of Curvature. Professional Services works with clients to innovate technical solutions to IT challenges.

The Park Place Professional Services portfolio includes:

We also debuted proprietary software ClearView™, a contract analyzer that provides an objective recommendation on how to optimize network hardware support, down to the device level.

Global Expansion

Park Place has been in hyper-growth mode for the last 5 years, and is establishing deep roots across the globe.

In April, we opened our new office and operations center in Westborough, Mass. The new location houses more than 120 employees and replaces our previous office in Marlborough, Mass. The Westborough facility features 54,000 total square feet of office space, and a 28,000-square-foot state of the art lab and warehouse that serves as the hub for Park Place’s parts and service operations. The new lab is double the size of our previous lab, fitted with enough power and cooling to efficiently maintain the constant server and network needs.

The new parts warehouse is also twice the size of the previous location. The added capacity will enable our logistics team to house more than 1 million critical parts and will add a layer of service flexibility that was not previously possible. Our Operations Center and field engineers will have added capacity for Park Place’s 24/7/365 service model.

Also in April, we débuted the new Enterprise Operation Center (EOC), a command center and mission control for all the ParkView Managed Services Offerings, located in Cleveland. A full crew of technical engineers began working in the Cleveland HQ Enterprise Operations Center (EOC) on April 14, leaving remote work behind for in-person collaboration in our brand-new Enterprise Operation Center.

The Enterprise Operation Center (EOC), command center and mission control for all the ParkView Managed Services Offerings, is a fully staffed 24x7x365 support facility providing collaborative workspace for Technical Engineers with multiple levels of certification and expertise delivering monitoring, remediation, and management of customer assets and infrastructure.

The EOC, three years in the making, is one of the first impressions made on visitors to Park Place HQ. The glass-walled room projects the importance of the work that happens within the EOC, with eight clocks tracking global time zones and an interactive display screen wall that allows engineers to collaborate, study and remediate client issues. The wall screen facilitates collaboration with our Westborough, MA- EOC and other centers with built-in video conferencing to bring in remote resources to internal teams and external clients. The wall screen supports 32 different, simultaneous touchscreen points, with dashboards and relevant real-time data to interact easily and drill into specific customer issues.

The growth is also impacting facilities around the world.

In September, we announced the opening of a new office in Hyderabad, India.

Park Place’s investment in India will provide regional clients with access to industry-leading IT services, including next-gen hardware maintenance for storage, servers and networking hardware, a suite of automated tools and managed services, and a superior customer experience underpinned by our First-Time Fix Guarantee. Park Place has recently graduated a class of a dozen in-country business development associates. A Sales Trainer and Sales Manager oversee the group, with an additional six-to-eight to be hired in 2022.

Awards

Our efforts are designed to make Park Place a destination for employees and the industry’s best partner for our clients, and it’s appreciated when industry awards recognize that. In addition to several local and regional awards for workplace culture, Park Place was honored with several major recognitions.

In 2021 Park Place received its ninth-consecutive listing on Inc. Magazine’s 49th annual Inc. 5000 list, the most prestigious ranking of the nation’s fastest-growing private companies. Park Place ranked No. 3,444 this year. Only 1.5 percent of companies on the Inc. 5000 are making a ninth appearance on the list.

CRN named Park Place to its 2021 Managed Service Provider (MSP) 500 list in the Elite 150 category. The list, released annually, recognizes the leading North American solution providers that have demonstrated innovative and forward-thinking approaches to managed services. These services help end users improve operational efficiencies and navigate the ongoing complexities of IT solutions, while maximizing their return on IT investments. This is the fourth consecutive year Park Place has been named to the Elite 150.

At the 2021 European MSP Innovation Awards, Park Place won the award for Best Managed Services Partner Support.

At this year’s UK Data Centre Services Awards, Park Place won top honors for Excellence in Data Centre Services, and Data Centre Managed Services Innovator of the Year.

For more than 10 years, including 2021, Park Place has been honored as a Weatherhead 100 company.  Each year, the Weatherhead 100 recognizes Northeast Ohio companies who are the best example of leadership, growth and success in the region.

A number of Park Place employees received major recognition this year:

President and CEO Chris Adams was named one of the world’s 100 Top CEOs in Innovation by WorldBiz Magazine.

Park Place Senior Vice President and General Counsel Betsy Dellinger was honored as one of Crain’s 2021 Notable General Counsels.

Frank Warren, Park Place Technologies Regional Vice President of Sales (West), was named to Channel Futures’ first-ever “Diversity, Equity & Inclusion 101” list. The list honors 101 global individuals are working to promote diversity, equity and inclusion in the Information Communications Technology (ICT) channel.

CRN named Jean Plank, Park Place’s Director of Channel Sales, to its 2021 list of Rising Female Stars. This list honors up-and-coming, talented women in the IT channel for whose contributions are shaping the future of the IT channel through their leadership, tireless dedication and innovative ideas.

Philanthropy

Park Place has joined global corporations focusing on needs in STEM by donating laptops to female students in Ireland who have limited or no access to technology, as part of the TechForGood initiative. This zero-waste recycling initiative bridges the tech accessibility gap.

In addition, Park Place will again help I Wish reach a global audience with its February 10, 2022 virtual event. In 2021, Park Place shared the details of the event with its 21,500 customers and its channel partners across the world, which assisted I Wish to reach a global audience in excess of 15,000 viewers across 19 countries.

Thank you

As always, we offer our deepest gratitude to the employees who make us what we are, and the clients who trust our partnership. We look forward to another year of growth and innovation in 2022!

About the Author

Jennifer Deutsch, Chief Marketing Officer
As Chief Marketing Officer, Jennifer leads Park Place’s marketing and communication teams with a focus on growing the Park Place Technologies brand as the global leader in data center and networking optimization.