An Exclusive Interview with Xavier Surentherathas, Regional Channel Sales Director of APAC, Park Place Technologies.

For effective information systems management, network optimization is a very important tool. plays an important role as information technology is growing at exponential rates with business users producing large volumes of data and thus consuming larger network bandwidths. If proper network optimization is not in place, the continuous growth can add strain to the network architecture of the concerned environment or organization. Park Place Technologies is such a company that provides networking optimization solutions on global market.

Analytics Insight has engaged in an exclusive interview with Xavier Surentherathas, Regional Channel Sales Director of APAC, Park Place Technologies.

Kindly brief us about Park Place Technologies, its specialization and the services that it offers. What is your biggest USP that differentiates the company from competitors?

Park Place Technologies is a global data center and networking optimization firm. Powered by the world's largest on-the-ground engineering team, a robust group of advanced engineers and our Enterprise Operations Center, we leverage a global parts supply chain, automation, machine learning and a comprehensive portfolio of services and products to optimize networking and data center Uptime and performance. Some of our undisputed differentiators include a truly global reach with offices in every global theatre, and an ability to bundle our unique and fully integrated DMSO (Discover, Monitor, Support, Optimize) approach, so customers enjoy streamlined infrastructure monitoring and management, cost efficiencies, less chaos, and faster mean-time-to-resolution – ultimately providing the freedom to think bigger.

Please brief us about the products/services/solutions you provide to your customers and how do they get value out of it?

Park Place's industry-leading and award-winning services include Park Place Hardware Maintenance™, Park Place Professional Services™, ParkView Managed Services™, Entuity Software ™ and Curvature Hardware sales. By offering a full portfolio, customers are able to place their entire data center needs with one partner. Those efficiencies go well beyond cost savings into long-term strategic benefits. With support contracts typically 30-40% less than the OEM; expertise in lifecycle management; automated support and more, clients have more time to focus on bigger picture initiatives and the budget to fund them.

How does Park Place's strategy facilitate the transformation of an enterprise?

Beyond meeting the acute needs customers have today, we're committed to helping them achieve their broader infrastructure objectives, too. As they work to drive their enterprise's growth and desired outcomes, we're committed to helping them on every step of that journey. Unlike OEMs and other service providers, we have a deeper, personal investment to see our customers succeed. We are fully committed to our customers, offering the lowest costs and highest levels of service in the industry. It's why we offer flexible contracts that provide an alternative to OEM lock-in. It's why we save customers 30-40% on their maintenance contracts without compromising on quality of service. It's why we have ongoing training for all of our engineers, who have an average of 15 years OEM experience prior to joining Park Place. It's why we operate a 24/7/365 "follow the sun" service model in 170 languages. It is why we live by the Service First philosophy. The customer's needs come first in everything we do.

As an organization we simplify the management of complex and hybrid technology environments, improving return on IT infrastructure investments. The scope of our business is to provide our customers with industry leading services that allow them to continue leveraging the investments made in technologies by extending the life of their assets.

We believe we have changed our industry for the better. By helping IT leaders discover and monitor their network infrastructures for problems and inefficiencies, provide world-class support when issues arise, and optimize for future business needs, we set in motion an engine of innovation that will empower IT to accelerate their digital transformation. We welcome competition in this new category — our hope is that we'll inspire our peers to follow our lead and offer customers a range of robust solutions, all with a high level of integrity.

What are the most important trends that you see in the data center market across the globe? 

With no sign of the global pandemic's end in sight, CFOs are scrutinizing every budget to minimize waste and maximize operational efficiency to prepare for worst-case scenarios. IT teams will be part of this re-evaluation, and third-party service providers that can provide better service and more uptime at a lower cost will become attractive alternatives. This allocation shift will require increased collaboration between CIOs and CFOs.

An influx of M&A activity and increasingly global teams creates stress on IT teams seeing as companies can double in size overnight. Onboarding and re-evaluating teams to maximize efficiency, uptime and reduce waste requires a dynamic, global team with experience in IT discovery and deployment services.

Global supply chain disruptions and the impact of the availability of new hardware will continue to be felt in nearly every global region.

What are the recent initiatives undertaken by Park Place for its channel partners?

In September 2021, Park Place Technologies launched the Uptime Partner Portal and Uptime Partner Program. These new Channel offerings provide enterprise IT teams with a single source of truth to maximize daily operations and create a seamless experience for their partners by leveraging Park Place's global service network.

The new Uptime Partner Portal is a global digital platform that offers enterprise Channel partners several benefits, including:

Easy and fast deal registration with just a few pieces of key customer information

A robust on-demand library of co-brandable marketing assets

Access to quick-tip videos to guide clients through the main features of the portal

Dashboard functionality, allowing visual measurement of success against crucial KPIs

Comprehensive overviews of Park Place's solutions and services, including ParkView Managed Services™, Entuity Software™ and third-party maintenance support

In tandem with the Uptime Partner Portal launch, Park Place also implemented the Uptime Partner Program. It comprises three program tiers – Platinum, Gold and Authorized Partner – that include a variety of marketing and sales support resources, co-selling opportunities, training, access to program investment dollars, as well as a myriad of other features.

In addition, Park Place introduced the first Partner Specialization Track – the Network Management Specialist Partner, which certifies Channel partners that sell and invest in training for Park Place's Entuity and ParkView network monitoring and management solutions. This also offers partners the ability to sell co-branded services for these products. From improving the customer support experience, to saving customers money on support costs, the Uptime Partner Program will enable and financially reward channel partners for their collaboration and customer advocacy.

What is Park Place's channel strategy?

At Park Place, partnerships are personal. Delivering value to every interaction is the cornerstone of our channel operations which is done in three distinctive and important ways:

We bring choices to the table. Being a partner means having access to a virtual catalog of choices and solutions to offer to your customers, allowing them to meet their unique business needs and ultimately, write their own success story. The choices you provide can help deliver results, making you the hero every single time.

We make doing business easy.No matter what you need to help meet your operational goals, we are there. From providing understandable information to easy-to-get quotes and quick responses to conducting smooth transactions, we pride ourselves on making every interaction easy and seamless from start to finish.

We keep you profitable. Our focus is on ensuring our partners are always moving up: up in sales, up in margin and up in opportunities. This allows us the ability to offer a strong front-end margin model to support investment in business development and provide special pricing programs that create collaboration to win the big deals.

Through our DMSO strategy, our portfolio of solutions helps equip partners with the power of choice and a roadmap for success that is ultimately passed down to the customer, allowing them to pave their own path to success.

What are your plans for the Indian market? What's your growth plans for the next 12 months?

Park Place Technologies is excited to build on our growth in the Indian market; the IT industry accounted for 8% of India's GDP in 2020, according to Software Technology Park of India, and the industry is expected to grow to US$350 billion by 2025. We want to continue to create awareness of Park Place and our portfolio of value-add IT services we can provide our partners and end-user customers with. We will continue to invest and build on our capabilities and presence throughout India, having recently opened an office in Hyderabad.

With the recent launch of our Uptime Partner Program and Uptime Partner Portal for our channel partners, it has never been a better time to work with Park Place.  We would encourage India based resellers and system integrators to reach out to us and explore how we can work together in partnership and collaboration to mutually deliver Uptime to our end-user customers, while also mutually growing our respective businesses.

The industry is seeing a rising importance of business and technology enablers like virtualization, convergence and cloud. How do you see these emerging technologies impact your business sector?

Given that the IT infrastructure of today nearly always spans outside of a centralized model, the challenge is how to manage an incredibly fluid, frequently mixed, and deeply cloud-enabled landscape – from desktop to data center, to edge, to the cloud. Unmanaged, the increasing complexity and the interlinked critical dependencies create eco-systems of havoc. Managed properly, IT can proactively push critical applications onto the most appropriate resources, whether on-prem or in the cloud, reaping manyfold increases in budget effectiveness and application performance across the infrastructure.

Whatever Asset Management is in place, it's clear that to play a significant role in any digital journey, it should be automated, dynamic and continually updated to gain reliability and to retain paramount trust in the data being returned. Maintaining accurate information cuts cost and risk and is also the key from which Asset Management can be used in a predictive capacity to detect problems before they occur. In return, it allows IT to reach timely conclusions such as upgrading or retiring an asset. Driven by accurate data capture, IT can now align high business-value applications with available infrastructure. And if that's cloud-based, you can now realistically plan the costs of accessing and storing data in the cloud. Armed with reliable usage reconciliation facts, finance can confidently access the same ITAM and can correctly settle invoices for cloud-based subscription services.

What is your leadership mantra?

Earn the respect of those you are privileged to lead through wisdom, accountability, empathy, drive, grit and determination.