Park Place Technologies Aims To ‘Take Market Share’ From SolarWinds

Chris Adams, CEO of fast-growing Park Place Technologies, has a bold technology and M&A roadmap aimed at taking market share from the competition.

Red-hot Park Place Technologies has spent millions on acquisitions and organic innovation over the past six months with sights set on stealing market share from SolarWinds.

“Our vision for the next few years is we are going to go head to head with the big guys like SolarWinds. We can really take market share,” said Park Place CEO Chris Adams in an interview with CRN. “We will create an alternative that just doesn’t currently exist. Right now, it’s just SolarWinds. After doing our homework, we felt that we can go head-to-head with these guys. We’re not a small company. We have a global delivery organization and a global sales organization.”

Since being acquired by private equity firm GTCR in late 2015, Park Place has acquired a total of thirteen companies or strategic business units, including most recently network monitoring software specialist Entuity and the network operations center (NOC) business of IntelliNet.

The Cleveland, Ohio-based company has historically been a superstar in the data center third-party maintenance space but is aggressively broadening its monitoring portfolio and worldwide go-to-market strategy. By the end of 2020, Park Place plans to have a new holistic offering that will be unmatched in the industry.

“We’re going to be launching VM monitoring and OS monitoring in the spring, then we’ll be launching [a new] solution in the fall. At that point, we’re going to have a new business model,” said Adams. “There’s really nowhere customers can go to find someone that can discover and find all their assets, then plug them in to monitor, give them a single pane of glass, maintain all the assets and provide optimization solutions. That’s really our goal. We’re going to have that solution finalized by the end of the year.”

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Park Place is currently in the process of integrating its current managed services and maintenance offerings with all of its recently acquired technologies such as Entuity’s monitoring software.

Adams said his company has a leg up over Austin, Texas-based SolarWinds because of its massive services offerings as well as its growing 17,000 customer base that spans across 58,000 data centers in over 150 countries.

“If you are Solarwinds, you sell a software product. That software product has to be installed by the customer. So they have to understand what they want and how to configure it. The customer then has to hire someone to actually do the installation which takes three to six months. Or they can come to us and we can do all the network monitoring for them. They don’t have to do the installation or the configuration, we do that, and we can also maintain it,” said Adams. “When we connect the monitoring, we set it up for the customer and say, ‘Look, for all these routers -- you can monitor or we’ll monitor them – but if they go down, we can also come fix them.’ That’s innovative. Software companies focus on software. Services companies focus on services. I’m trying to focus on the customer. Monitoring is half the story, the other half is maintaining it. They want someone that just does it all for them. That’s really one of our main focuses.”

Another important initiative this year is leveraging the vast amounts of data collected from its 17,000 customers. Park Place plans to hire more data scientists this year to drive deeper customer relationships by leveraging data analytics.

“One big initiative this year is to start mining that data in the long term,” said Adams. “What if every time I have a customer I can now say, ‘Based on your profile, here’s your high risk. We know this because we have 500,000 assets in 150 countries, and we see that this manufacturer in this particular instance fails a lot higher. However, we see this manufacturer fails lower in this instance. We’re not going to tell you what equipment to use. We just want you to understand your circumstances.’ So that’s the future – predictive and proactive is big. We want to get better at that. Data will be a big investment for us in the next three years starting in 2020.”

Park Place was a 2019 CRN Triple Crown Award winner and ranks No. 104 on CRN’s 2019 Solution Provider 500 list.

Founded in 1991, the company’s flagship offering is its automated monitoring ParkView platform, which integrates 24/7 global customer service and advanced engineering through a single pane of glass to deliver immediate responses to maintenance needs.

In terms of M&A in 2020, Adams said his company has no plans on slowing down. “I expect to do a couple of maintenance deals this year and a couple deals that are outside of maintenance and more around innovation,” he said.