Maintenance specialist Park Place has been growing rapidly; as well as acquisitions such as the UK’s MCSA Group in April, there has been strong organic growth. “When I look at EMEA there's a lot of activities happening from the internal growth that we're seeing,” says Sean Sears (pictured below), appointed as EMEA head earlier this year. Sales are strong, he says: “the numbers show one hundred percent organic growth, and then there are the acquisitions.”
In the corporate office in North Greenwich, London, he’s taken over another part of the seventh floor and another section of the eighth floor of the building. “We have a very strong partner and channel program. And it is very strong globally - our customers may have a UK customer head office, but their reach could be national, in Europe or global.”
He has been busy both on internal organization and meeting customers since joining. “That customer conversation has really changed in the past couple of years. Previously we would really talk about and focus on maintenance and it was all about maintenance and cost reduction. In the last two years our conversation has gone deeper and wider.”
It is no longer about failures and downtime, he says. “Now customers are talking about how we can help them with the uptime. Park Place started down that path two years ago being not only about that reactive response but how can we eliminate the downtime. So we started looking and investing heavily with a product (ParkView). With the AI component and the modeling the predictive maintenance allows us to work with the customer to prevent that box from going down - working on your (the customer’s) timeline and time scale as to when it is replaced and we’re seeing major value in that. Maintenance becomes the last part of the conversation.”
Then the discussion could be about how can the customer can re-allocate resources to maximize projects. And it is now not just a conversation with IT management. “Now that conversation is with procurement, or with the CFO because they're all seeing the value as an alternative to what the OEMs are putting out there.”
It is interesting that discussions which had been about cost reduction and reducing headcount have moved onto project management and how they can reallocate some of those skillsets to do other things to deliver their solutions, he says. “In Park Place we also have in-depth expertise in project management, data centre optimization, integration, and not only the technical component since we are hardware-agnostic.”
Park Place has been growing, but is it facing too much demand for its resources? “Every organization faces that problem. If we don't have that expertise we're very upfront with our customers right in the beginning and we'll tell them. And if we don't have it, we have partners that we can leverage and we will point them towards the experts in that field.”
“Honesty and integrity is everything to us. And if we can't do it we don't tell you that we can't do it after the fact. We're upfront right in the beginning. I think that's why we've been in business for what's going on 30 years. That's why we've been able to have a 93% customer satisfaction and a 98% retention rate.”
“I think one of the reasons why we've been so successful in EMEA and around the world is we've stayed laser-focused on what we do. I don't want to dilute our growth; we've seen too many times that as a firm wants to go big they start skimping on service. And if I have to I would I will throttle back a little bit to make sure we don't do that because our customers are the number one priority.”
Mid-market enterprise seems to be the sweet spot: £250,000 to £4bn-sized businesses; but more companies that were very rigid years ago and focused on OEM are opening up, saying they want to look out for other solutions, he says.
“We recognize that customers are dynamic, so building solutions has to be dynamic.
We're not in the market of building the data centre. It the customer has equipment in there they want to augment, they want to expand on it and they need to support it proactively, that's our core business. We’re very laser-focused so we're not getting into some of those other aspects of the data centre. It's still a proactive maintenance and support and we're seeing growth across all the European markets.”
But more could be on the way; as well as an impending acquisition (more in next few weeks) which aims to broaden the offerings, the product coverage could be made wider by a move to add operating systems’ monitoring to what has to-date largely been hardware.
“We're going to be moving up the stack with our product. So while we are now doing the proactive monitoring of the physical hardware - the power supplies, the motherboards and so on, we'll be announcing shortly that the OS layer is next. We want to monitor, in essence, the entire box from top to bottom because it's all interdependent.”
“I'm also still looking at it penetrating different countries and markets within EMEA and there's so much work as I look at that. We have over 16000 global clients in 140 countries over 1800 stocking locations like warehouses around the globe to service our customers. That’s nearly 400000 parts that are available to customers. It's a great time for the company and it's a great it's an honour for me to lead the EMEA team.”
