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Park Place eyes further expansion after spate of UK buyouts

Chief operating officer says international business now sits at 25 per cent of sales

Third-party datacentre maintenance firm Park Place Technologies is looking to grow its workforce further as its expansion continues.

According to Chris Adams, chief operating officer for Park Place, the expansion will follow a similar template to the firm's expansion in the UK, which saw it snap up three UK-based outfits since last September.

"As we expand globally, it is the customer who leads us to new places. We are in 100 countries at this point globally… We reached critical mass in the UK so we established a physical presence, a sales office and support people for the UK, so customers did not have to call up the US for support," he said.

"Germany naturally will grow along with opening up this office as an extension of that strategy and it has been extremely successful. Europe is our fastest growing market right now. Park Place's strategic goal was [to generate] one third of revenues outside of the US when we started, this came from when we were at five to eight present outside of the US. We are at 25 per cent right now outside of the US; it has been very exciting."

While Park Place's M&A activity has put the firm under the media spotlight over the last year, Adams claims that the company made a name for itself in the US through organic expansion. Yet, despite this, Adams said there is always more opportunity for M&A - especially in Europe - as a means of growing the business.

"We really grow organically. We grew in 2010 and our compound annual growth rate exceeded 25 per cent. By having that organic growth, we were able to create the foundations and a healthy company that was able to make those acquisitions," he said.

"We have dozens of acquisitions in our pipeline. We treat it almost like a sales pipeline. You will not necessarily see larger deals; it is more about quality… There are a lot of players in our industry, it is an extremely fragmented market."

Park Place's recent buyout of US-based datacentre maintenance firm NCE was its largest yet. The 280-strong employee outfit has its headquarters in Wiltshire in the UK, but draws about two thirds of its business from the US, through its San Diego office.

"They have been in this industry for 35 years. They have a good reputation in the market which is very important for us. They have a great relationship with channel players in the market and in our industry. There are not a lot of third-party maintenance firms that sell through the channel; CDW is one of our largest clients and to see another player out there with that experience was attractive.

"They add a lot of depth to Park Place. We started out in the US with [the main] cities being very central to our business. Now the objective is to offer a consistent global experience when you get away from those cities. We want our customers to have the same experience in London, but also in the north of Scotland."

The firm moved more towards its goal of offering a "global experience" for customers when it opened an outpost in Singapore in November last year. Adams claims that, as Park Place's overseas operations become more stablished, less tasks and responsibilities are being carried out from its US headquarters.

Another big push for Park Place is to take its offering "beyond maintenance and break-fix". The COO said that within the next six to 12 months, Park Place is aiming to add new managed services capabilities to its arsenal.

"We are growing our capabilities, but it will always be specific to datacentre maintenance," said Adams. "We have all of this engineering talent, but what else can we do with them? What other things can we do with the datacentre? We have been making significant investments in technology to offer additional services beyond maintenance and break fix. We will be launching new products in the next six to 12 months which will make us more proactive with maintenance and add managed services. We want to know something is broken before the customer does."