Robo-BOFH giant Park Place Technologies slurps Brit IT biz MCSA

Expanding its vendor-agnostic support service in the UK

Data centre maintenance giant Park Place Technologies has gobbled MCSA Group, a British IT services business headquartered in High Wycombe.

The financial details of the deal were not disclosed.

"With this acquisition of MCSA, Park Place will be the largest [third-party maintenance provider] in Europe," said president and CEO Chris Adams.

"We look forward to welcoming MCSA's customers and bringing our award-winning proactive maintenance services and support to MCSA's customers, while expanding our ability to service current and new customers in the UK."

MCSA was formed in 2015 from a merger between Maindec Computer Solutions and CSA Waverley – the latter has provided IT services since 1983. The company offers 24/7 IT maintenance, design and consultancy services, and resells hardware. A large part of its business is tied into the public sector.

MCSA runs six offices in the UK, including one in Scotland, and employs more than 145 staff.

Park Place deals in post-warranty maintenance for storage, server and networking hardware from all major OEMs, with global headquarters in Cleveland, Ohio. The company said it supports more than 35,000 data centres in over 110 countries.

In recent years, Park Place has branched out into the promising predictive maintenance market. Its ParkView software platform uses analytics and machine learning to identify potential hardware faults before they cause any downtime.

Once a fault is detected, ParkView automatically creates a ticket and performs "triage", attempting to identify the exact nature of the issue and provide information to resolve it. This functionality is based on the TrueSight Operations Management product from BMC Software.

"This is the right move for MCSA, the staff and for me personally," Roger Timms, MCSA's founder and chairman, said of the acquisition.

That's a strange phrase to use because it's almost exactly what Andrew Boyle, managing director of CSA Waverley, said in 2013, when his company was acquired by Maindec to eventually become MCSA. A case of recycled marketing, perhaps.

This latest deal continues Park Place's acquisition spree: it purchased four companies in 2018, including Origina Technology Services in Ireland, CMG-Nicsa in Argentina, Axentel Technologies in Singapore, and Solid Systems CAD Services (SSCS) in Houston, USA – its largest acquisition to date. ®