It wouldn’t be completely accurate to say that Park Place Technologies redefined the data center infrastructure management industry by accident. But it probably would be fair to say that by late 2019, Park Place suddenly realized it was no longer just a leader in its field—it had unexpectedly built a new field entirely. And it was probably the only company in the world who could play in it.
Park Place had been operating in the data center management space for more than two decades, with most of its early years focused on offering IT hardware warranties. But over time, its service portfolio naturally expanded—from hardware maintenance and monitoring to asset discovery, network management, server management, and IT software, Park Place steadily developed a list of supporting products to supplement its core warranty business. After more than 20 years of consistent growth, that list had gotten pretty long.
“If you think about the whole wrapper, we were probably up to 11 or 12 different managed and professional services,” said Michael Cantor, Park Place’s Chief Information officer. “And we could offer that blend really well with the rest of the product offering.”
By the middle of 2019, clients all across the world—eager to centralize services under a core vendor—were increasingly deploying those auxiliary services together. That was when Park Place truly saw the paradigm shift it had largely helped create: not only were these services actually meant to blend together, but Park Place was likely the only provider available who could actually achieve that end.
Thanks to Park Place, the datacenter industry suddenly had a new service approach on its hands: DMSO. And Park Place had developed that approach at the exact right time—when a work trend called anywhere operations was becoming more important than ever.
The birth of DMSO
Park Place realized that even if its unparalleled range of services truly did constitute a new service category, it was going to need a little help in quantifying that. So its leadership called Gartner, the global technology consulting company known for deep industry research and public service provider assessments.
“We knew where we were headed, and we were looking for something to hang it all on—we had all these various pieces and parts, but what was the connective tissue?” said Cantor.
When they explained the situation to the analysts at Gartner, he recalled, “the lightbulb went on.” With Gartner’s help, Park Place—already a consistent Gartner Magic Quadrant inclusion for TPM (third-party data center maintenance) services—coined the term DMSO: Discover, Monitor, Support, Optimize, a fully integrated approach to managing critical infrastructure, particularly for distributed teams. It was more than a symbolic knighting; as of late 2019, Gartner was officially recognizing Park Place’s unique portfolio as an entirely new field of service.
Their logic in codifying the solution went as follows: The first step in a sound IT environment is knowing what’s in it. That’s where Park Place’s Discovery services come in, helping organizations fully understand either their own datacenter infrastructures or those of a company they may be acquiring. Regardless of what kind of infrastructure is in play—on premise, cloud, or hybrid—it will then need to be Monitored for health and uptime. If something goes wrong, that infrastructure will need Support. And even the finest of systems need continued Optimization for capacity and performance.
Even in a vacuum, such a width and breadth of services under one roof was unprecedented. But Park Place’s DMSO offering was also perfectly in-line with one of the key workplace trends of our time: “anywhere operations”, or how companies use various technologies to allow employees to work from anywhere in the world to offer services anywhere in the world. Through a mixture of virtual and in-person support options—developed from its core warranty business—Park Place could provide DMSO’s multi-pronged support practically anywhere on the planet. In that sense, it was ahead of its time—and that’s because anywhere operations is built into its DNA.
"We've been a global third party maintenance (TPM) supplier for years and years—that's just kind of embedded into our basic set of thinking," Cantor said. "Global companies need global solutions—it doesn't really matter where you are. We're going to supply it anywhere, anytime."
In other words, Park Place has been facilitating anywhere operations conversations for a long time—and across the trend’s variety of complicated and evolving facets. That includes elements beyond typical IT considerations: for many companies, modern anywhere operations is also fundamentally a human resources problem. Because DMSO stretches to every corner of the globe, Park Place can even alleviate talent sourcing issues.
“Workforces are getting harder and harder to retain—everybody is fighting for every bit of talent," Cantor said. "If you can outsource some of that and apply software to it, you don't really have to worry about anywhere operations necessarily being anywhere in the state, or anywhere in the country—you can look at it anywhere globally. And we offer the software behind the scenes that doesn't really matter where you are."
Park Place had been ahead of the anywhere operations trend for years. What it couldn’t predict, however, was how critical that trend would become in the great work-from-home movement that accompanied COVID-19. Before the new age of remote work struck in early 2020—just months after Park Place introduced DMSO to the market—many organizations were still working with a single hub of data centers, centralized on-site. IT managers had full control over the hardware and their networks and could see everything from the ports users were connecting on to the configuration of their devices. But once COVID struck, those same IT teams became reliant on people’s various home infrastructures, introducing a significant degree of complexity to most companies’ environments.
Shifting that “moat” of IT is a core part of what makes Park Place’s DMSO offering so unique—its holistic, hyper-converged infrastructure management alleviates much of that burden from in-house IT managers, who might otherwise be drowning in the sudden deluge of remote work sparked by the pandemic. Imagine a scenario where “one day you went from 500 VPN (virtual private network) connections to 2000,” Cantor said—a shift far too abrupt for most IT departments to support on their own.
In other words, when COVID hit, many organizations found themselves in a very difficult IT spot, very quickly. Park Place—long since a leader in implementing anywhere operations solutions—was the perfect partner to help them through it.
Looking forward
Clients spanning from Fortune 500s to brand-new startups have come to Park Place seeking support all across the world. Part of the reason is because its services—again a leader in anywhere operations thinking—are compliant with a variety of international legal structures and local regulations (like GPDR).
But in order to serve such needs efficiently, Park Place has had to become more nimble itself. After all, when clients realize they have a need for the kind of IT management that DSMO offers—especially in a remote work surge—it tends to be urgent.
“There is usually something in their business that has changed rapidly,” Cantor said. “They want to see something tomorrow. So we’ve put in a very agile infrastructure so we can put up things quickly.”
Park Place has officially set the bar for a modern database service provider—and its set that bar pretty high. In the full throes of the anywhere operations movement—and because of the capacity it creates for companies to better pave their own path forward—DMSO is poised to become the standard-bearer in an industry of its own making.
And that’s brilliant news for IT leaders—anywhere and everywhere.
