Park Place is keen to boost partners and customers understanding of its role and will launch a formalised channel programme later this year under its new channel head, Jeff McCullough. He joined a few months ago as Global Vice President of Channel Sales. He talked to IT Europa about the business direction, the increase demand for its services during customers recent transition to remote working and its plans for later in the year.
Park Place built up its reputation as a third-party maintenance business ad through organics growth and acquisitions, and now aims to strengthen its international position by offering a range of services based around its core. "I think the portfolio we bring is unique in the marketplace and aims to solve some big challenges, but regardless of current issues, it is a business that is critical and needed at any time. The current crisis means that customers will rethink both the costs of their IT infrastructure and how they will execute their business in the longer term,” he says.
“We are seeing right now that customers are thinking about improving remote monitoring and management. How do they improve the ability to service our infrastructure and service, and moving to a position of recognising that not every year is going to be great for growth.”
On moving jobs from channel planning from larger vendors (including his time at Dell Software and HP), he says: “For me it was a different opportunity and chance to create a channel programme – to rebuild it for the next level. [The plan is to] Take a business that is 40+% indirect and establish a growth strategy through a bigger and richer programme. There are lots of reasons for jumping – but simply it is a unique opportunity to use my experience.”
On the current situation, he has been busy talking to his channels: “Feedback from partners so far has been strong and there has been a high demand on awareness education for our remote offerings and Entuity the networks analytics business which we acquired last year and which we are building the go-to-market for.” He reports lot of interest in the last several weeks as partners are looking for solutions and trying to figure out what they can do for customers.
“What we are doing today and which is proving beneficial is that value proposition which is constant. It demonstrates how useful it is when times are good and otherwise. No customer is not interested in saving 40% on their costs.”
“We have a lot of partners thinking about us as a lead service offering that solves critical problems.The good news it that we can execute super-fast – in the last weeks, for example we have turned customers round in 24 hours as their equipment goes out of warranty.”
Speed of response is important in the current environment, he says: “Our inside sales organisation can jump on an opportunity with a partner and we have a pricing team that can respond very quickly. We can scale and execute – right now it is just ensuring that partners understand what the options are.
He says he has spent a lot of time on calls with partners around the world recently on how they can leverage remote monitoring, management and services. “We are educating people every day. In March the level of requests from partners was unprecedented. Particularly the largest partners have been dealing with customers moving to home offices.”
“As they release their first quarter results, they will show a strong March on laptops and accessories. But that surge has an end-life. A lot of partners recognise that the next opportunity is in the data centre, and its remote servicing and management.”
Anything which helps customers defer costs is in demand, he says – nobody wants to refresh infrastructure currently. “They want to delay upgrades. We can deliver 3-6 month programmes to help customers with products coming out of warranty. Or customer who can’t get equipment from vendors, and situations with platforms which cannot be retired.”
The customers will have spent their budgets moving to home office and there was a lot of spending on getting their people to work remotely. Now they look at what is available for the rest of IT and data centres. We see the opportunity as significant as we can save a lot of money in tight funding situations.”
Partners are helping customers reset their sights on managing data centres and their cost management. “I think the expectations have been adjusted, but we are servicing customers at a very high level, and we are bringing real answers, as partners recognise. My objective is to drive organic growth through the channel.”
As outbound sales teams engage with customers and ask them how they like to buy and through which partners, he like to see more response and mutual growth: “When we bring business to a partner it would be good for them to come back with two-three other customers that they want us to work with. This is our organic growth opportunity. We can accelerate this as it has not been programmatically tapped. Towards the year end we will have a global partner programme; we don’t currently stratify our partners and these things need to be brought out. Our programme will crystallise our expectations with partners and how the go-to-market works, particularly how we can drive profitable growth.
The challenges apart for the crisis is the shrinking on-premise infrastructure, growing cloud and how things they have been used to doing have evolved. Partners will be more into services, management and consulting and these will become a bigger part of their portfolios,” he concludes.
