National Institute of Agricultural Botany (NIAB)

The Relationship
Park Place Technologies has been working with the National Institute of Agricultural Botany (NIAB) for the past 6 years, primarily focusing on server maintenance for its HPE server estate. Park Place inherited the relationship with NIAB, following on from Park Place’s acquisition of MCSA Group in 2019.

The Challenge
When Park Place Technologies inherited the relationship with NIAB, our engagement was for third-party maintenance for their hardware estate. As our relationship with NIAB strengthened through a demonstration of our capabilities during our initial engagement and mutual trust, over time, NIAB’s interim COO reached out to Park Place Technologies in confidence, to see if we could help with a Managed Services solution for their full core infrastructure. The requirement for a Managed Services solution
was a change in IT strategy for NIAB, arising from the need for a planned organisational restructure. This meant a consolidation of locations, and a reduction in headcount, which would impact the IT team in terms of personnel, and technological footprint at the organisation. This move meant that NIAB would be self-maintaining its IT infrastructure, resulting in no further need for third-party maintenance, moving to an infrastructure managed services model.

How We Helped 
This contract has gone through various iterations and has always been flexible to NIAB’s needs. A direct example of this is providing NIAB with a higher tier of Managed Services than was being paid for to ensure that their business came first, delivering a ‘Full’ manged services, when contractually per the Statement of Works (SOW), our obligation was to provide a ‘Plus’ tier of Manged Services. Our ongoing support of NIAB has directly influenced its IT strategy; we have built a great relationship with trust and transparency at its core, with our team being seen as an extension of NIAB’s, as they work closely with Park Place engineers daily. Our quality of service for NIAB has seen the organisation recommend Park Place Technologies to its peers. As we continue to demonstrate our capabilities, we have been given additional opportunities to look after other elements of NIAB’s IT estate, replacing another supplier to take over a Managed Services of various hypervisors/hosts (VMware). Our Managed Services provides cover at one location, providing full coverage for 7x VMware hosts, 16 x Windows VMs, 6 x Linux VMs and 12 x core network devices. Additional benefits to NIAB from Park Place support includes service delivery excellence, contract simplification, budget savings, and enhanced patching and remediation.

The Future
The project was a good opportunity for Park Place Technologies to demonstrate and reinforce our expertise, credentials and capabilities centred on IT infrastructure managed services, with service excellence and delivery at its core. Our depth and breadth of IT infrastructure Managed Services continues to grow as we help customers realise wrap-around Managed Services for part or the whole of their hardware and software/OS footprint. Recently, Park Place was appointed to once again provide third-party hardware maintenance for NIAB’s core data centre hardware estate. Park Place Technologies anticipates more opportunities to service NIAB, throughout their IT footprint, as our partnership continues to grow from strength to strength, and we continue to advise and consult with NIAB.

Personal Experiences 

“As NIAB faced mounting challenges, we needed a partner that was well-resourced enough to be ready for any eventuality, but had the regional and local presence to earn trust and establish a relationship beyond its contracts.”
-Joseph Amosu, IT Support Manager

“NIAB’s important work has been enhanced by the service, attention, and partnership of Park Place. The established support processes and proven governance strategies were flexible to our needs, and have ensured seamless transitions and ongoing productivity”
– Joseph Amosu, IT Support Manager