Acquiring CSI thrusts Park Place Technologies to the “top of the food chain”, one of its top execs has claimed.
Ohio-based datacentre support giant Park Place on Tuesday grabbed £50m-revenue UK IBM partner CSI in what it billed as the second-most significant deal in its history (behind only its 2020 purchase of similar-sized peer Curvature).
Talking to IT Channel Oxygen, David Cramer, President, Solution Delivery at Park Place, confirmed that Birmingham-based CSI had been running a sale process following its turnaround under Alan Watkins.
“We were looking to be acquisitive, and they were looking to be acquired,” he explained.
“At the top of the food chain – that’s where CSI plays”
CSI typically works “higher up the stack” than Park Place, meaning it complements Park Place’s existing UK managed services business, Cramer claimed.
“If you think about our service offerings, we come from break fix and hardware fault – and then with our managed services, we begin to move up the performance and log and IT operations management service food chain,” he said.
“But at the top of that food chain – that’s where CSI plays. They’re doing larger hybrid cloud services, larger enterprise services, application monitoring, security services, backup and recovery services. So those are all very complementary to what we offer.”
CSI also complements Park Place’s managed services offering by handing it “a lot of IBM talent and expertise”, as well as propelling it into the hybrid cloud space, Cramer said.
“We had seen some other deals we didn’t act on that were similar in the US – where there were some IBM-specific businesses that had been shopped around,” he said.
“We had been looking, but just hadn’t gone deep on any of them.
“This one just fit.”
Will direct-selling CSI – which serves medium-to-large enterprises in highly regulated industries such as financial services, manufacturing and retail – dilute Park Place’s focus on selling via the channel?
“With CSI’s service offering being a little bit more complex, we need to figure out what they bring to the table that our channel partners can sell – and we will absolutely drive those through our existing and any new channels that we get as a result of this,” Cramer responded.
“But certainly, there may be some higher-end, complicated solution selling CSI offers that we decide doesn’t make sense for them to sell.”
“A nice add-on”
CSI ranked 101st in the recent Oxygen 250 2025, with Park Place sitting in 47th.
Park Place’s UK business turned over £105.8m in calendar 2023, employing an average of 613 staff. It expanded its UK maintenance business in October 2023 by acquiring Derby-based Xuper.
The addition of CSI will roughly double Park Place’s headcount in Birmingham, where it already operates a large warehouse for its maintenance business, Cramer indicated.
Globally, Park Place claims to employ over 2,200 staff and have 957 spare parts locations.
“I wouldn’t call [CSI] an acquisition that’s going to change the fabric of our business in Europe or in America. It’s a nice add-on for us,” Cramer said.
Although a couple of CSI’s top team will move on after a transitionary period, Park Place will endeavour to retain as many of CSI’s circa 175 staff as possible, Cramer indicated.
“A big part of this [deal] was talent acquisition. We get a lot of good IBM skills and a lot of good IT infrastructure skills as a part of it,” he said.
“We already have a CEO, so we don’t really need one of those, and we already have a CFO. But outside of that, we’re trying to keep all of them because we think it’s a great fit.”
Doug Woodburn is editor of IT Channel Oxygen
