Park Place Technologies CEO On New ParkView Service, M&A Ahead

‘From an innovation perspective, nobody has consolidated all of these capabilities for the customer in one solution like we just did,’ says Park Place Technologies CEO Chris Adams.

Park Place Technologies CEO Chris Adams said there’s no other company out there that can deliver the same all-in-one data center management solution as Park Place’s new ParkView service.

“From an innovation perspective, nobody has consolidated all of these capabilities for the customer in one solution like we just did,” said Adams in an interview with CRN. “No one has created a portal approach like we have where they can deploy it self-service easily. And nobody has figured out how to eliminate all this noise and vendors for the customers with one solution like we have.”

Park Place has created a new business unit for its new ParkView product suite that enables customers to efficiently discover, monitor, support and optimize all of their data center equipment and IT infrastructure. The new services within ParkView include Discovery, a data center asset management service platform; ParkView Network Analytics, which combines a network discovery tool with network data to monitor and alert where traffic is traveling; and ParkView OS Monitoring, a new managed service for server and storage monitoring at the software level.

In an interview with CRN, Adams talks about how the new ParkView solution helps customers excel during the COVID-19 pandemic, hiring top-notch executive talent and acquisitions ahead this year for Park Place.

“Because of COVID-19, this product, this service offering is getting a bit of a springboard. I don’t want to benefit from COVID, but the truth is, the world went very much distributed,” said Adams. “Our solution really does support that distributed work environment.”

How innovative is the ParkView stack compared with other data center management solutions in the market?

You can get point solutions for all these things. You can get somebody that might do discovery, or somebody that might help you do network analytics or network support, or someone that can get someone maintenance. You can’t find anyone in the world that consolidates all of that in one solution for a customer.

Ease of deployment is key with our solution. We can deploy this solution in 30 minutes. Then it has self-service capabilities. We just launched another component, called ParkView Implementation Portal, where our customers can go into the portal to see all the assets that have been either discovered or under maintenance with Park Place. It will show green if they can connect them from a monitoring perspective. If they want to connect it, they can actually deploy that self-service themselves now. They don’t even need someone from Park Place to set it up. Find me a monitoring solution anywhere in the world that can do that for their customers and put it all into one place, one portal, and consolidate all those to one vendor. The innovation comes in consolidating it and making it easier to use for our customers.

What is the importance of consolidating all these point products into a single solution for customers?

From an innovation perspective, nobody has consolidated all of these capabilities for the customer in one solution like we just did. No one has created a portal approach like we have where they can deploy it self-service easily. And nobody has figured out how to eliminate all this noise and these vendors for the customers with one solution.

This is very important for the customer because I want to make it easy for them to focus on the important things in their data centers. Not focused on, ‘Oh boy, I have a server down and I don’t know if it’s the operating system or something else. I’m not sure if it’s even in warranty. Who do I call?’ When that happens, then they’re not doing their jobs because their worrying about something that’s not a value-add to their business. We want to take all that noise out and allow customers to have an efficient environment where they can focus on the value-add things.

Does the new ParkView accommodate the new buying patterns of business during COVID-19?

Because of COVID-19, this product, this service offering is getting a little bit of a springboard. I don’t want to benefit from COVID, but the truth is the world went very much distributed. There’s a lot more stress on networks and the performance of their data centers now because people are distributed. Our solution really does support that distributed work environment, whether it’s discovery and knowing what you have and where it’s at, or the monitoring to be able to remotely perform these services so people don’t have to be in the locations they normally would have to go to prepare these things. Then there’s our ability to do maintenance and support because customers’ budgets are constricting so they’re now carrying equipment longer, so our maintenance services become much more important to the customer.

Then you have the whole network because there’s a ton of stress on these networks. Our network solutions are top-notch. Customers want to be monitoring their performance closer so they make sure they don’t have employee productivity issues, we’ve got a great solution for that.

To the extent they want to consolidate all of that, we’re the only player out there that can do all of this. Because business has changed so much during COVID, fortunately or unfortunately, it is really an ideal time for us to launch this. The nature of the way people are doing business today, it is being better received than it would have been six or 12 months ago.

You’ve hired top-notch executive talent from Dell EMC, NetApp and VMware. What’s the strategy?

My vision is to have a foundation for the next 10 years of growth. So I’m trying to find people that make us better. People who have all kinds of diverse backgrounds and experiences that can help us to think bigger and to be a more successful business in the future. If you just do what you’ve always done, in my opinion, you’re going to slow down or stop. You have to be looking ahead. If you pat yourself on the back too much, tomorrow is going to be tougher. From my perspective, I want to find people who don’t pat us on the back, but who challenge us and make us better.

So John [Parlee] from a security perspective, he’s going to help us as we launch all these new offerings, make sure that we protect our customers. Michael Vedda from Dell EMC has a ton of experience in and around our industry. He’s adding a ton of value. We brought David Cox and Kathie Lyons, who both had a history at EMC—both of them are helping us grow from an operations perspective. We’re trying to make sure that we have the right foundation for the company to continue to scale for the next decade. That’s the goal with all these hires.

Park Place recently made its 14th acquisition since 2016. Should we expect another acquisition or two this year?

Yes. We still have the pedal to the metal in that regard. We’re not going to let up. It’s been a good business strategy for us to acquire these companies and bring them into our family. Yeah, you should expect some more deals to close hopefully this year. I hate to say that because I’m a little superstitious. If we’re close to a deal, I feel like if I say something like that, something unexpected could happen. But we definitely have a pipeline of deals in the works right now and are looking forward to some closes in the near future.

We’re really excited about our new ParkView service offering. It’s so unique, new and innovative. We think it’s the foundation for not just Park Place, but the whole industry to try to get creative for the next 10 years as organizations continue to transform their data centers.