The IT Nerd

Park Place Technologies will showcase solutions designed to help organizations scale AI infrastructure more efficiently at Gartner IT Symposium / Xpo 2026, October 19-22 in Orlando.

Visitors to booth #449 will experience a live liquid cooling demonstration and connect with experts on GPU-powered infrastructure, data center optimization and strategies for supporting AI growth without increasing IT spend. Park Place Technologies is a leading global IT infrastructure services firm.

On Tuesday, Oct. 20, 12:05 p.m. EDT at Stage 2 Atlantic Hall, Stock will lead a special vendor presentation entitled, “How CIOs are Funding AI Without New Spend.” He will address the challenges many organizations face in optimizing AI utilization while facing budget constraints alongside growing infrastructure demands. Stock will share practical strategies for identifying and redirecting existing infrastructure savings to support AI initiatives.

Attendees visiting Park Place Technologies can:

• Experience a live demonstration of liquid cooling technology designed for high-density AI workloads.
• Meet with company leadership, including CCO John Stock and CTO Chris Carreiro, to discuss infrastructure modernization and AI readiness strategies.
• Explore how Park Place helps organizations maximize uptime, performance, and lifecycle value across GPU-powered AI, analytics, and HPC environments.

Gartner IT Symposium / Xpo is one of the largest annual gatherings of CIOs and IT executives, drawing thousands of senior technology leaders. This year’s program, themed Ignite Intelligence, focuses on how enterprises move AI from experimentation to production at scale.

To register with Park Place’s exhibitor discount, visit Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo™ 2026 Conference in Orlando, FL and use Park Place’s code SYM36EDC to save $575.

Additional 2026 Appearances

Following Orlando, Park Place Technologies will exhibit its AI infrastructure expertise to Gartner Symposium / Xpo events in Barcelona, Spain (Nov. 9-12) and Yokohama, Japan (Nov. 4-6). Attendees can meet with Park Place experts to discuss data center modernization, infrastructure lifecycle management, AI readiness, and support strategies tailored to today’s evolving IT landscape.

About the Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo 2026

Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo is the world’s most important gathering for CIOs and other IT executives. IT executives rely on these conferences to learn how to amplify the impact of the technology, insights and trends shaping the future of IT and business. Follow news and updates from the conferences on X using #GartnerSYM, and on the Gartner

Park Place Technologies has extended its Microsoft Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) capability for Microsoft Azure to customers across the United States and Canada. This extension brings a cloud practice already established in Europe to two of the company’s largest and fastest-growing markets.  

Park Place Technologies is now able to license, provision, support and manage Microsoft Cloud services for customers throughout the United States and Canada, with support for Microsoft 365, Azure, Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) and Microsoft’s broader business, data and AI platforms. 

The significance of this expansion is what it enables for customers: a more direct, accountable path to Microsoft cloud and applications. It also empowers customers to make enhanced infrastructure decisions with the support of a partner that already understands their estates.  

Park Place has built its reputation by supporting complex, business-critical infrastructure for more than 35 years, a foundation that remains a key advantage as customer estates become more hybrid, distributed and outcome-driven. The company’s cloud practice is underpinned by a firm commitment to continuously innovate, expand and add new routes to value without losing sight of the infrastructure realities customers depend on daily. 

Bringing CSP capability in-house removes a layer of complexity for customers and puts Park Place’s own engineers and account teams behind every Azure engagement, from design through ongoing support.  

For customers in the U.S. and Canada, Park Place’s CSP capability includes cost optimization and management, security and identity services and managed cloud operations across Azure Virtual Desktop, Microsoft 365, SQL, Dynamics and Copilot. This complements the company’s broader Microsoft competencies, supporting the full journey from migration and modernization planning to ongoing Microsoft environment support. It also strengthens Park Place’s broader Infrastructure Managed Services and Software Technical Support portfolio solutions, allowing customers to leverage a single partner for cloud, Microsoft environments and the infrastructure that supports them. 

Park Place’s expanded Microsoft Cloud Solution Provider CSP capability is available now to customers and partners across the United States and Canada. Organizations interested in learning more can contact their Park Place representative or visit ParkPlaceTechnologies.com. 

ParkView Asset Intelligence, an AI-powered platform that shows IT managers the health of their infrastructure and insights to act on it, launched today from Park Place Technologies.

Called ParkView Asset Intelligence^TM, the new proprietary platform provides a detailed view into the condition of hardware devices, including servers, storage, network, security appliances and hyperconverged infrastructure, at a level previously only accessible to original equipment manufacturers (OEMs).

Each lifecycle health score, expressed as a 0 to 100 rating, is built from three streams of data – Park Place’s own hardware maintenance records, spanning more than 35 years and a million serviced assets across every major manufacturer; regional spare-parts availability; and customers’ own asset performance and service history.

A score of 66 means something very different once a team can see that comparable devices in the same model family average 92, Adams gave as an example. The result is designed to help experienced IT teams decide whether to refresh, repair or retire a specific piece of hardware.

What ParkView Asset Intelligence Does

The platform combines hardware telemetry, Park Place’s service history and live supply-chain data into a single view of fleet health:

• Scores every asset, 0 to 100 – Hardware-level data is collected out-of-band from enrolled assets, independent of the operating system, so scoring continues even when the OS is unreachable. Each score is paired with a confidence indicator.
• Reads failure patterns no single customer can see – Park Place service records across nearly one million of hardware assets reveal how specific models fail, and at what age. No individual enterprise runs a fleet large enough to detect those patterns on its own.
• Factors in whether parts actually exist – data on spare-part stock by geography feeds directly into the score, so an asset’s supportability in its own region is part of the reading rather than a separate calculation.
• Surfaces risk before it becomes a failure – Configuration problems, firmware gaps and deteriorating component trends move the score before they generate a support ticket.
• Benchmarks against the peer group – Every score is set against aggregated data from comparable devices across Park Place’s global customer base, showing whether an asset is performing above or below the expected range for its model.
• Rolls up to the whole fleet – A portfolio dashboard breaks health scores out by OEM, product family and location, making it possible to spot trends across thousands of assets and concentrate attention where it matters most.

For organizations running hardware past OEM support on a third-party maintenance contract, the scores supply the documented evidence needed to justify that decision internally — or the early warning needed to act before a failure forces the issue.

Availability

The beta version of ParkView Asset Intelligence is available now to all existing Park Place customers and will close on October 31. New customers of Park Place can receive the full version of ParkView Asset Intelligence immediately.

For more information about ParkView Asset Intelligence, visit https://www.parkplacetechnologies.com/parkview-asset-intelligence/.

Generative AI has crossed the line from experiment to return on investment for roughly half of enterprises, but the infrastructure that runs the rest of the business is still waiting for its budget. That tension is the subject of the newest episode of The Savvy CIO, the podcast from Park Place Technologies, available tomorrow wherever you get your podcasts.

Host Bradd Busick sits down with Rob Brothers, an IDC analyst who has spent nearly four decades on every side of the infrastructure lifecycle market, as a value-added reseller, as a third-party maintainer and now as an analyst covering the space. The conversation is built around a decision nearly every IT leader faces on a fixed calendar: what to do when the OEM warranty expires.

Brothers points to research showing a sharp turn in AI outcomes.

“Forty-five to 50% of enterprises are now beginning to see an ROI on their generative AI initiatives, which is great,” Brothers said. Busick notes that the same conversation a year earlier put that figure closer to 10 to 20%.

But the same budget that funds those initiatives has to come from somewhere. “A lot of the studies that we’ve done recently show that customers are really trying to use budgetary dollars for AI initiatives,” Brothers said. “And that doesn’t leave a lot for everything else.” Meanwhile, the price of the new gear has changed the math entirely.

David Kramer, President of Service Delivery at Park Place Technologies, warns that the sticker price is only the visible part of a refresh. “Your teams have to learn the new technology. You have to pay for installation and configuration of the new technology. You need time to let the new technology bake in and test in your systems and in your environments,” he said. He also notes who tends to be driving the urgency: internal campaigns for the latest hardware are “aided and abetted by the salespeople from the OEM itself, because the OEM is incentivized to sell more hardware.”

Brothers’ guidance for CIOs is to narrow the AI aperture and keep the existing estate supported while they do it. Expect 50 internal use case ideas, he says, cut to about six, and plan on two producing real outcomes, while acknowledging the constraint that outlasts every hype cycle: good quality data. “The data is generally what bogs everybody down,” he said. “It’s the same thing that bogged us down in AI is the same thing that’s bogging us down in gen AI.”

Episode 6, “The Renew, Refresh, Replace Dilemma with Rob Brothers,” is available on September 30 on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Amazon Music.

Computer hardware comes with a price tag you can see, but increasingly, the rest of the IT budget does not. In the newest episode of The Savvy CIO, hosted by Bradd Busick, Mark Dunkerley, VP of Enterprise Technology Services and CISO at Coca-Cola Bottlers’ Sales & Services, said, “I don’t think anybody knows how to calculate AI costs.”

Dunkerley, who supports nearly 60 Coca-Cola bottlers across North America, traces a 20-year arc in how hidden spend shows up. It began with, “I need a server, I need storage.” It moved to the cloud, where shadow IT and consumption costs are hard to govern even with a mature cloud team. Now it has moved again, and this time, he argues, the industry does not yet have the math.

That uncertainty collides with a planning process built for a slower era. Dunkerley makes the case that the three-year roadmap still has a role for lifecycle and technical debt work, but that no leader can credibly forecast AI three- to six-months out, which makes transparency with non-technical executives, reserved project budget, and strong business relationships the real controls. “Hidden spend,” he said, “is as much a governance problem as a finance one.”

The episode also pushes back on the assumption that AI is a shortcut past foundational work. Dunkerley points to two constraints no model resolves on its own – unreliable data and unexamined processes.

Both leaders land on the same prescription – bring data and facts to the executive table, shift accountability for risk and spend from a single CIO or CISO to the broader business, and treat governance, risk, and compliance as the mechanism that makes it stick.

The Savvy CIO is produced by Park Place Technologies and explores the budget pressures, AI adoption challenges, and security concerns facing today’s IT leaders, along with the people solving them every day.

Episode 5, “Managing the Spend You Can’t See,” is available now on Apple Podcasts, and Spotify.

Park Place Technologies, the leading global data center and networking optimization firm, today announced TekWurx as an official partner for Entuity Software™, Park Place’s award-winning network observability and performance monitoring solution.

This strategic relationship brings together Entuity’s powerful network monitoring and observability capabilities with TekWurx’s expertise in operational data, service modeling, CMDB optimization, and IT operations transformation. Together, Park Place and TekWurx will help organizations gain deeper visibility across their IT environments, improve operational trust, accelerate incident resolution, and make more informed business decisions.

As enterprises continue to navigate increasingly complex hybrid infrastructure environments, IT operations teams are under growing pressure to maintain visibility, understand service dependencies, and respond rapidly to issues before they affect the business. By combining Entuity’s intelligence with TekWurx’s operational data expertise and uControl platform, customers can achieve a more complete, trusted, and actionable view of their technology estate.

“This partnership reflects Park Place Technologies’ commitment to delivering greater value to customers through a strong ecosystem of trusted partners,” said Case Allin, GM, Software Solutions, Park Place Technologies. “TekWurx brings deep expertise in transforming operational data into meaningful business insight. As a partner for Entuity Software, TekWurx is well positioned to help customers extend the value of network observability into service intelligence, automation, and operational resilience.”

Through this relationship, customers can move beyond simply monitoring infrastructure to understanding the real-time business impact of operational events. The combined capabilities of Entuity and TekWurx will help organizations improve service awareness, reduce risk, and drive more efficient IT operations.

Customer Benefits

Organizations working with Park Place, Entuity, and TekWurx can expect:

• Improved visibility across network, infrastructure, and service environments
• Faster incident detection, investigation, and resolution
• Reduced operational risk through more trusted operational data
• Improved CMDB and service model accuracy
• Better understanding of service dependencies and business impact
• Increased operational efficiency through automation and intelligent workflows
• Stronger decision-making through contextualized operational intelligence

For more information about Entuity Software and Park Place Technologies, visit www.parkplacetechnologies.com.

For more information about TekWurx, visit www.tekwurx.com.

Park Place Technologies released the third episode of The Savvy CIO, “Why do AI Buildouts Fail?”, in which host and former National CIO of the Year Bradd Busick and guest Skylar Roebuck, CTO of Solvd, examine why most enterprise AI programs never survive the trip from a controlled demo.

The numbers are stark. A widely cited MIT study put the AI initiative failure rate at 95%, a figure Roebuck says was repeated by “every vendor in the world” at AWS re:Invent despite flaws in how the study was run. Solvd ran its own survey and found a similar result, with nearly 80% of respondents reporting AI initiative failures.

Roebuck’s diagnosis is that enterprises are still scoping AI work like software projects. In earlier technology waves, he argues, the transformative idea could be separated from the organizational change required to absorb it. That separation no longer holds.

Throughout the episode, Roebuck shares practical guidance for technology leaders looking to scale AI successfully across the enterprise while avoiding common pitfalls that derail transformation efforts.

The Savvy CIO is produced by Park Place Technologies and explores the budget pressures, AI adoption challenges, and security concerns facing today’s IT leaders, along with the people solving them every day.

Episode 3, “Why Do AI Buildouts Fail?,” is available now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and YouTube.

Park Place Technologies today announced it has achieved its fourth “Powered by Nutanix: Verified Solutions” badge. The badge reflects the company’s commitment to designing and delivering services aligned with Nutanix prescribed best practices and architectural standards.  

Through the “Powered by Nutanix: Verified Solutions” program, Park Place Technologies’ Sovereign Cloud offering has been reviewed against Nutanix-defined technical and operational criteria for alignment with platform best practices. As data sovereignty moves up the boardroom agenda, this offering responds to a clear market need: cloud models that give organizations the freedom to innovate while maintaining greater control over data location, governance, and operational risk. 

It follows the successful achievement of our previous “Powered by Nutanix: Verified Solutions” badges for Dedicated Private Cloud, Multi-Tenant Private Cloud, and Disaster Recovery as a Service solutions, reflecting a sustained, scalable commitment to delivering secure, resilient, and enterprise-grade cloud and IaaS services to customers. 

These recognitions are designed to provide customers with confidence that their cloud services are built on Nutanix technology and aligned with defined design and operational guidelines.  

The “Powered by Nutanix: Verified Solutions” program empowers service providers to deliver comprehensive, market-ready cloud offerings built on the Nutanix Cloud Platform. These solutions provide a modern architecture that is designed to support performance, security, and scalability requirements and the flexibility to support virtual machines, containers, and AI workloads, all managed via a single, unified control plane. 

With four “Powered by Nutanix: Verified Solutions” badges, Park Place Technologies has achieved a key milestone that underscores its commitment to delivering validated, enterprise-grade cloud solutions. 

The announcement comes at a time when many organizations are reassessing their virtualization and cloud strategies. As enterprises evaluate options for hybrid cloud, sovereign cloud requirements, and alternative virtualization platforms, Park Place Technologies provides customers with a range of deployment models supported by independently verified solutions. This enables businesses to align infrastructure decisions with operational, regulatory, and commercial objectives while reducing transformation risk.

The Park Place xCloud platform, powered by Nutanix technology, offers customers flexible deployment options spanning dedicated private cloud, multi-tenant cloud, Disaster Recovery as a Service, and sovereign cloud. This approach allows organizations to place workloads where they make the most sense from a performance, security, compliance, and cost perspective. 

The latest validation further strengthens the longstanding relationship between Park Place Technologies and Nutanix and highlights the organizations’ shared commitment to helping customers modernize infrastructure while maintaining operational resilience and business agility. 

The “Powered by Nutanix: Verified Solutions” badge reflects evaluation against Nutanix program criteria and does not constitute a warranty, endorsement, or guarantee of performance, security, or regulatory compliance by Nutanix.  

Park Place Technologies has been named to the 2026 Inc. 5000, the annual list recognizing the fastest-growing private companies in America.

Park Place earned the No. 4,874 spot on this year’s ranking, rejoining the list after narrowly missing the cutoff in 2025; it has received this recognition for 10 years. The Inc. 5000 has become one of the most respected measures of entrepreneurial success and sustained business growth in the United States, recognizing companies that have demonstrated significant revenue growth while navigating changing market conditions.

Since its founding in 1991, Park Place Technologies has built a global presence serving organizations across industries with third-party maintenance, managed services, professional services, IT asset disposition and network monitoring solutions. The company’s continued growth reflects increasing demand for flexible, cost-effective alternatives that help enterprises optimize their technology investments.

This year’s recognition marks another milestone in Park Place’s history of appearances on the Inc. 5000.

The 2026 Inc. 5000 celebrates the private companies that have achieved remarkable growth over the past three years, representing a wide range of industries that are shaping the future of the U.S. economy.

Park Place Technologies today announced the release of the latest episode of its podcast, “The Savvy CIO.” Episode 2, “Liquid Cooling: When, Why, and Which?”, features Zac Smith, CEO and co-founder of Datum, in conversation with host Bradd Busick about one of the most urgent and least understood shifts happening inside today’s data centers.

For decades, keeping liquids away from hardware was the cardinal rule of data center design. AI has changed that equation. As rack densities climb from a few kilowatts to hundreds of kilowatts, with megawatt racks on the horizon, traditional air cooling can no longer keep pace, forcing IT leaders to rethink infrastructure at the chip level.

In the episode, Smith walks listeners through the practical realities CIOs face today: how to evaluate workload requirements, what questions to ask data center and colocation partners, and the operational risks, from monitoring gaps to what he calls the “2:00 AM problem,” that come with adopting liquid cooling.

The episode also includes perspective from Chris Carrero, Chief Technology Officer at Park Place Technologies, on the lack of industry standardization across liquid cooling systems and the gap between greenfield and brownfield data center readiness.

Key discussion points include:

• Why AI and GPU-driven workloads have made liquid cooling a “now problem,” not a five-year plan
• The trade-offs between immersion cooling, direct-to-chip cooling, rear door cooling, and traditional air cooling
• Questions every CIO should ask their data center and hardware partners before committing to a cooling strategy
• The operational and staffing changes required to support liquid-cooled infrastructure safely

The Savvy CIO is produced by Park Place Technologies and explores the budget pressures, AI adoption challenges, and security concerns facing today’s IT leaders, along with the people solving them every day.

Episode 2 is available now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and YouTube.