With an expanding, young population and economic growth outpacing many Western markets, India has attracted interest from a diverse array of multinational enterprises. These companies are struggling to compete, and local incumbents are upping their games to maintain their market position against incoming challengers.
Technology operations are critical, as they are anywhere in the world. Businesses that can drive digital transformation and deliver better product and service experiences to customers will win. But managing data centres and other enterprise infrastructure can be challenging in such a rapidly evolving market as India.
Park Place Technologies serves customers in the majority of Indian states and its capabilities span the subcontinent and Asia-Pacific. Whether the customer has a single data centre in Mumbai, or several facilities from Chennai to New Delhi to Kolkata, or are a multinational with operations in the Philippines, Indonesia, or far flung locales, Park Place Technologies can apply a single support solution to meet all the customer’s requirements.
Ian Shearer, Managing Director, APAC, Park Place Technologies shares more about the company’s strategies and competencies.
How do you see the adoption of third party maintenance (TPM) and the requirement for organisations that could maintain and manage data centres remotely?
As companies evolve with more complex data centers that incorporate cloud, co-lo and on-prem hardware across many OEMS, and in many places across the continent and globe, it will be crucial to simplify and centralise remote maintenance. As no OEM will cover another OEM’s hardware, consolidation will be critical. A TPM can consolidate contracts and reporting across all OEMs, but more importantly, a TPM that scales like Park Place can organise a potentially chaotic situation through single pane of glass remote discovery and automated remote monitoring.
As per India, which verticals/sectors are aggressive users of TPM?
Our client base in India includes premier companies in the logistics, healthcare, telecom, materials, automotive, BFSI (banking, financial services, and insurance), entertainment, advanced technology, and numerous other sectors.
What are the technical complexities when it comes to remotely maintaining data centres?
It is much less complex than many people realise. Park Place offers ParkView, a fully automated maintenance service that streamlines the hardware support process and helps data centers boost uptime. Whether you’re monitoring storage, server, or network devices, ParkView reduces the number of touchpoints between you and a maintenance solution to two easy steps. It is even possible for a client to self-install ParkView.
How Indian companies can maximise their investment, drive costs down, and extend asset life with Park Place services?
Park Place provides a one-two punch to the bottom line. We provide more affordable support than the OEM, and we help clients keep the hardware in service until they have squeezed maximum value from their investment. Along the way, we also maximise uptime, reduce staff time devoted to maintenance, and provide insights that enhance performance, reliability, efficiency, and processes. It all adds up to a budget-friendly effect that our clients have come to depend on.
At Park Place, our clients’ average savings fall in the 40 to 50 percent range. This makes third party maintenance an excellent alternative to the OEM as soon as the first post-warranty renewal comes up. In fact, many Park Place clients are cutting back on the OEM support they purchase alongside new equipment, so they can move more quickly to a lower cost solution and make additional room in the budget for strategic IT spending.
At Park Place Technologies, we supply all the components a client expects from a maintenance solution—24/7 remote monitoring, online, mobile and telephone-based troubleshooting, on-site repair, full component coverage, and certified spare parts among them. But we go further by providing unparalleled access to IT hardware and O/S experts. We impose no restrictions on accessing help with any hardware, software, or firmware issue, and we integrate greater engineering resources at each stage.
Being able to keep IT hardware past the manufacturers’ end-of-support-life date is becoming increasingly important to IT organisations, especially when budgets are tight or certain equipment is highly reliable but non-strategic. Park Place delivers with post-EOSL contracts that enable clients to keep paid-for equipment in service for as long as they need it, without incurring added risk of downtime, spares shortages, and other problems. Post-EOSL support is about more than just delayed capital expenditure—although that alone makes it worth the time to investigate. It’s also about reducing the headaches and costs associated with new hardware selection, purchase, installation, migration, de-bugging, and training. Taken together, these tasks drain the OPEX side of the budget as much as the hardware purchase does the CAPEX. Incurring them only for IT hardware that will deliver business value is, therefore, a smart move.
Which all cutting edge technologies go in to enable robust remote data centre management?
We have already discussed ParkView and its advantages. But we also know how important it is to support diverse network environments. With Entuity Network Analytics you can discover, monitor, manage, and optimize your entire network across countless devices supplied by a whole host of different vendors. ENA supports thousands of devices out of the box across hundreds of vendors.
Entuity Network Analytics automates network discovery and uses intuitive workflows that make it easy to see when something has gone wrong. Responsive dashboards allow you to take a high-level view to gauge your network health, or drill down to the component level to quickly and efficiently fix network problems.
PPTechMobile enables you to identify devices that need support by simply using the phone’s camera to scan the bar code. The app will decode the bar code and automatically populate the corresponding serial number in a ticket submission form.
How are you facilitating organisations to combat downtime?
IT leaders know they can’t afford even a moment of unplanned downtime. The cost of outages has spread to over US$ 300,000 per hour, according to Gartner.
ParkView reduces clients’ downtime in many ways, ParkView learns the environment, it begins to identify faults at earlier stages. Automated systems also ensure no warning signs are ignored. That means in many cases Park Place engineers can swap out a component or make a change to avoid downtime altogether. When an outage has occurred, getting back to normal is the top priority. With the aid of ParkView, we’re now notching 31 per cent faster incident resolution. The biggest time sink in the break/fix process happens when a second or third repair attempt is necessary. ParkView greatly enhances our diagnostic capabilities and provides more information in advance, so engineers can arrive prepared to implement a fix. Plus, our high-quality spares avoid component-related issues. These factors combine to drive uptime to new heights at a cost that pales in comparison to the cost of an unnecessary outage.
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