BT Strengthens IT Infrastructure Through Professional Services & Maintenance Solutions

The Relationship
Park Place Technologies’ relationship with BT dates back to 2020, following the acquisition of Curvature by Park Place Technologies. When Park Place Technologies started working with BT, our initial engagement focused on its IT hardware maintenance and hardware break-fix requests. This was to service the hardware infrastructure within its own data centre, as well as the hardware infrastructure of its growing customer base. As Park Place has continued to evolve and innovate, introducing a portfolio of market leading IT infrastructure services, BT and its customers have continued to benefit exponentially.

The Challenge
BT approached Park Place Technologies to assist them with one of its customers, an international financial markets operator, with the support of an RFP to manage the lifecycle of their IT edge compute and networking hardware infrastructure. These devices support the client interface to the processing network, for customers of the international financial markets operator. The RFP was very broad in scope, to facilitate the management of the lifecycle of these devices. The scope comprised of various facets, including; the staging and warehousing of the IT hardware, the logistics and shipping of the devices between Park Place warehouses and Forward Stocking Locations (FSLs), and the shipping of devices from a Park Place warehouse or FSL to the customer data centre.

Additionally, the RFP scope also included the provision of on-site IMAC (Install, Move, Add, Change) services, providing a tailored break-fix service for failed devices in the field, and the decommissioning and disposal of the hardware when retired. The hardware assets include routers, switches, and HPE servers, in numerous locations throughout EMEA, LATAM, and North America.

How We Helped 
Park Place’s solution was to engage with our IT Professional Services team to help develop a program to support the complexity and scale of the activity. This required setting up Regional Staging Centres in Amsterdam, Netherlands; Birmingham. UK, and Louisville, US. FSLs were engaged to provide hardware stock for local deployments. Relocating the devices so that they were closer to the clients of our customer, was required to avoid delays due to customs processes, and ensure we had adequate break-fix parts and spares in stock. IMAC activities were provided by the Park Place engineers where possible, and with our extensive partner network where Park Place has no Field Engineer (FE) presence. All requests for services are initiated on the BT portal, where Park Place has direct access to manage the delivery and communicate updates and status back to the customer.

A dedicated governance team was put in place to oversee the management of engagement. Initially this required the implementation of standardised processes in conjunction with the customer. The governance team is responsible for overseeing the ticket requests being made on the BT portal, and to provide weekly updates and status on all activities back to BT and their customer. Throughout our engagement with BT and its international financial markets operator customer, we worked together in partnership every step of the way to ensure any additional customer needs were met and delivered to the agreed date milestones. There was strong collaboration and communication between all parties, enabling daily project updates, managed by our in-country project managers and ensuring that the customer was always kept up-to-date on the progress of the project.

Completing the engagement for this project, a very happy customer commended Park Place Technologies on our professionalism, attentiveness to detail and ability to showcase flexibility when it came to project moves, adds and changes.

The Future
This program has been operational for close to 4 years now, with a renewal of the engagement completed in March 2024 for another 3 to 4 years. The customer is operational in over 2,500 locations globally and in the future, there may be scope to support their estate of SD-WAN devices. In working with BT, across our shared capabilities, Park Place Technologies anticipates more opportunities across our full portfolio of IT infrastructure lifecycle services to further help BT and its customers.

We are observing engagements with other teams within the BT group and engaging with more customers as we broaden our exposure within the BT ecosystem.

Personal Experiences 

“Thank you and the team for the professionalism, dedication and flexibility demonstrated throughout the engagement with our finance market customer.” -Project Manager, BT

“We had a face-to-face meeting with the customer this week, and they made a point of telling us how pleased they are with the service and level of communication they received, throughout the duration of the project.” – Global Commercial Business Manager, BT