Energy Company Receives Global Support and Savings
Case Studies
OVERVIEW
“We have a lot of responsibilities when it comes to the oil and gas industry, with our overriding vision being to enhance the performance of the world’s energy industry,” the company’s data manager said. “We provide quite a bit of support for the oil and gas industry around the world. Large companies depend on us to produce products and design processes for chemical plant separation facilities.”
With so much global service at stake, the firm cannot afford downtime in its data centers.
“We want a partner that can do the work that we have at hand and not have to have one vendor in this country, another vendor in that country, and always worry about who we are supposed to call when something breaks,” the data manager said. “Park Place gives us the opportunity to have one point of contact, one phone number to call, one portal to go in and submit a ticket, and in a very simplified means to get all of our traditional break/fix issues taken care of. In addition to global reach, Park Place provides us with significant cost savings.
“It’s really straightforward when it comes to the difference in cost of maintenance contracts for OEM support compared to the cost of Park Place support. I’d say pretty much in every case that we’ve had an opportunity to evaluate cost, we easily save 50 percent from the OEM cost, and in some cases, even more.”
CONVENIENCE AND SERVICE
Cost savings and global reach are important, but the data manager said an equally critical factor is the convenience and customer service Park Place offers.
“The onboarding process with Park Place is very simple. We have a great account team that takes care of us and anytime we need to bring new equipment into a support contract, all of those things happen really fast,” the data manager said. “Park Place is extremely flexible and gives us the opportunity to drive our own cost models for locations and assets. We have never had any bottlenecks or slowdowns from the Park Place team. The experience is consistent. The Park Place leadership team has been very thoughtful in how they’ve orchestrated the organization and has been very deliberate in making sure that every employee that works for Park Place understands their purpose and the importance of customer service. It really makes it very pleasant from a customer perspective. Every time we’ve had to interact with any member of the Park Place family, it’s the same, no matter what; we get the same level of experience, which is great.”
PARKVIEW’S SINGLE PANE OF GLASS
The firm utilizes ParkView Hardware Monitoring™, which identifies hardware events, opens tickets and triages the issue.
“We’ve been using ParkView, predominantly supporting our storage subsystems with NetApp and EMC, our two dominant storage providers. ParkView is the proactive monitoring that gives us a single pane of glass for all of our systems that are under third party support,” the data manager said. “Park Place will notify us for issues with systems that are being monitored through ParkView. Generally, in those cases we find out about problems that we didn’t know about. No matter what mechanism we use, whether it’s through the online Central Park portal tickets, or admission escalations through our account management team, the support is always fast and very consistent.”
AN EVOLVING RELATIONSHIP
The data manager said if a peer was looking for a reference on third party maintenance, he would stress how Park Place is evolving to meet client needs.
“Park Place has been in a constant position of evolving over the time that we’ve been doing business, constantly looking at the areas they support, and have been expanding globally to make sure that they have complete coverage for all their customers across the globe,” he said. “Park Place has been very thoughtful and deliberate about continuing to grow what they do for the marketplace, things like additional monitoring tools and capabilities extending beyond traditional break/fix hardware, really moving into application dependencies, operating system support, any number of things that really help with the full life cycle of management and operation. They are moving way past third-party support and really focusing on discovery, monitoring and optimization in addition to the support components they currently offer.
“It’s been a fantastic opportunity for me to work with Park Place and to experience true customer service. So many companies today really give up on that and it’s great to see Park Place continue to keep customer service in the crosshairs. It is a pleasure to do business with Park Place.”