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Exclusive: Park Place acquires rival Curvature

CEO Chris Adams reveals to CRN rationale behind the merger and what it means for the TPM firm's channel ecosystem

Park Place Technologies has acquired rival Curvature.

The acquisition now makes Park Place the world's largest third party datacentre maintenance company, the firm claimed.

It is also the largest acquisition Park Place has made, CEO Chris Adams told CRN, though he didn't disclose the terms of the deal which closed yesterday.

The acquisition will bring Park Place's headcount to over 2,000 and now means Park Place has 445 of the Fortune 500 companies as customers.

Adams said Park Place had considered snapping up Curvature in 2016 when it went through an auction process and that a merger between the pair always "made sense" but the wheels only fell into place in the past year.

"We've been talking on and off for years; over time we would connect here and there and it was only in the last year that it seemed like it would finally fit and make sense," he elaborated.

"It took a little time to get there with two complex, private equity-owned organisations to put together. I'd say in the last 12 months we've been having these discussions on and off and then the deal heated up more over the summer.

"I've been with Park Place for 15 years and when I started Curvature was the industry leader and we all looked up to it and it set the tone. In the last 10 years, we grew pretty healthily and became the industry leader, but we're still both the top performers, so the idea of combining always made sense."

The combination of Park Place and Curvature now creates a new entity in the space and a "significant competitor" to OEMs, Adams stated.

The deal will triple Park Place's spare parts inventory to over one million parts available in over 2,400 stockists and brings it into the new markets of Denmark, Australia, Thailand and Japan.

Just under half of Park Place's new business is done through the channel and it intends to add some channel capabilities to Curvature's model, the chief exec said.

"Roughly 40 per cent of our new bookings go through channel partners, whereas Curvature focuses more on information technology outsourcing (ITO) relationships and not so much on actually selling through the channel," he explained.

"We have a lot of channel partners and it's been a very successful relationship for both sides. I think that we're going to add some channel capabilities to the Curvature model that they don't have today and they're going to bring some depth in the ITO space that we don't have today."

As to whether Park Place wants to increase the amount of business that goes through its channel, Adams said that it is always looking to do more business through the channel but that it's dependent on partners being "aggressive".

"[The percentage of our indirect business] ebbs and flows on its own, 40 per cent is towards the higher end that I've seen over the years," he explained.

"We're always trying to grow it and we provide resources to the channel and incentives for them to sell our services through their organisations. But it really is more how they adopt it and how aggressive they are; some channel partners really are comfortable with selling most warranty and maintenance, others are less so and we have to work with them.

"We certainly would always try to grow our channel relationship, without a doubt."

As for the integration strategy, Adams noted that it will be larger than any previous process that they've done but that the roadmap remains the same, led by its own dedicated M&A team, supported by KPMG.

"We have a playbook that we've used 15 other times that we're pretty comfortable is a good wireframe outline for this integration and we will ultimately migrate all the customers over to the Park Place infrastructure," he stated.