Converge Technology Solutions Corp. [TSXV:CTS] has been recognized by CIOReview Magazine as the recipient of “Top 20 IBM Solution Companies - 2020,” based on our proprietary methodology, reflecting its position in the industry. This profile has been developed by the CIOReview research and editorial team based on insights from an interview with Greg Berard, President and David Luftig, President, Northeast Region.

Converge Technology Solutions Corp. [TSXV:CTS]
CTS]

Rampant technological innovations in the areas of cloud, big data, machine learning, and artificial intelligence (AI) tend to provide the impetus for enterprises to innovate their legacy business models and lead the market. However, to enjoy the fruits of innovation, businesses have their work cut out for them. Many companies have little expertise in leveraging container technologies in the cloud for robust IT performance. Moreover, they lack a clear roadmap to achieve high returns on their data analytics and cloud investments. Developers, in addition, are finding it difficult to build secure AI-based applications due to the lack of understanding of guidelines and policies, especially in regulatory-intensive industries such as healthcare and finance. Consequently, firms feel they are forced to choose between innovation and security. They want their IT to perform seamlessly across multiple environments (on-premise, virtualization, containers, and cloud), minus the operational complexities associated with such hybrid infrastructure.

Converge Technology Solutions Corp. [TSXV:CTS] can help firms sail through these troubled waters of hybrid cloud, digital infrastructure, cybersecurity, and advanced analytics.

Having acquired 12 regional IT solution providers and value-added resellers (VARs) in just three years since its founding, 9 of which are IBM-centric, Converge has established itself as a provider of state-of-the-art hybrid IT solutions, leveraging IBM products, and providing private managed services ranging from infrastructure management to business process operations. “Our portfolio of solution providers has the necessary certifications and expert resources with hands-on experience that modern companies need to satiate their IT requirements,” says Greg Berard, president of Converge. In addition, the seasoned leadership team and client-focused work culture have helped them excel as the wellspring of ideas, innovation, and enablement. Unsurprisingly, Converge has been recognized as one of the most valuable IBM partners for hybrid cloud in North America.

“Our portfolio of solution providers has the necessary certifications and expert resources with hands-on experience that modern companies need to satiate their IT requirements”

At the core of Converge’s success is its ability to provide a foundational IT infrastructure that acts as the launchpad for companies to go full throttle with their holistic transformation initiatives. The company provides clients with IT resiliency and flexibility to choose the platform of choice to host their workload. Ultimately, clients can operate their business with greater efficiency and win more loyal customers.

Making the Most of Current Opportunities

Today, enterprise customers and cloud vendors alike are rallying behind sophisticated hybrid cloud environments managed through Linux, containers, and Kubernetes. Against this backdrop, IBM has hit the bullseye by acquiring Red Hat, a company that made open source technologies attractive and easily consumable for enterprise users. And the recent development of IBM Cloud Paks puts firms’ cloud and digital transformation journey in the fast lane. “As our practice areas perfectly align with IBM’s practice areas, the renewed robustness and flexibility in the IT giant’s solutions portfolio enhances our ability to serve clients far better than ever before,” says David Luftig, president, Northeast Region, Converge.

For Converge, IBM’s Red Hat move puts the spotlight on the three core offerings: Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), Red Hat Ansible, and Red Hat OpenShift. And the company has the right ammunition to deliver apt solutions to its growing clientele.

Converge can leverage RHEL to help clients migrate their workloads to the hybrid cloud environment before enabling them with containers.

The company guides clients on having their RHEL install base running on the platform of their choice, be it IBM Power Systems or other compute platforms, based on their requirements.

As our practice areas perfectly align with IBM’s practice areas, the renewed robustness and flexibility in the IT giant’s solutions portfolio enhances our ability to serve clients far better than ever before

While the cloud brings resiliency and modernization, containers have brought game-changing improvement to enterprise IT with their ability to improve the portability of workloads, making them adaptable to public and private cloud. In addition, open source-based Kubernetes simplifies container implementation through automation. With its expertise in open source and proprietary products, Converge is aptly positioned to help clients with these transformative activities. To make matters easy for its clients in running business operations, Converge leverages Ansible, an open source software provisioning, configuration management, and application-deployment tool that allows enterprise users to manage both on-premise and cloud deployments in a hybrid environment. “Through numerous workshops and events across the country, we have demonstrated to our clients the business use case of automating workloads,” Berard adds.

In recognition of the investments made in areas including application development, delivery and integration services, Converge has been a Red Hat Apex Partner since the program’s inception.

As a Red Hat APEX partner, Converge works with OpenShift, which is emerging as the default choice for hybrid cloud. With OpenShift, enterprises can steer clear of issues such as lack of agile and DevOps expertise and leverage containers and Kubernetes to orchestrate microservices and drive automation across the application development and delivery lifecycle. Therefore, clients can save on resources and time spent on imaging, testing, and maintaining apps as the teams no longer need to release security patches frequently. “Especially for our clients using pure IBM solutions, we are offering them the ability to leverage OpenShift to run IBM technologies in a containerized format on any cloud platform,” says Berard.

Futuristic Applications Driven by Analytics and Security

Converge’s unique strategy of acquiring the top-performing companies in the IBM ecosystem has fetched great dividends in the area of advanced analytics as well. Its highly skilled teams made up of experienced technology and cybersecurity experts, business consultants, and industry thought leaders drive significant value. The teams have deep experience in building applications based on machine learning and AI. They follow an agile framework and industry best standards while remaining nimble to guide clients through digital transformation. Looking under the hood, Converge utilizes natural language processing, conversational user interfaces, voice interaction, image recognition, and text analytics to address real world business problems.

Over the last two years, Converge has worked closely with its clients, brainstorming with them to turn ideas into innovation, helping them move away from their traditional infrastructure and build modern platforms to stay one step ahead of the market competition.

During the interactions, Converge spends significant time understanding their business requirements and how they carry out operations. Organizations that follow manual and archaic ways of managing operations can benefit from able solutions delivered by a firm with a history of success, like the Converge family of companies. Converge helps modernize applications and workloads using AI and machine learning and deploys those solutions to the cloud. Additionally, the company aids clients in attaining insights internally for growing the business. “These solutions put our clients a cut above their competition in terms of business functionality and customer service provided to their customers,” says Luftig.

Filling the Gaps in Enterprise IT

Part of Converge’s strategy is to help companies chart a roadmap for the future and be competitive. Going by the current trends, digital enablement has become more than just a buzzword. And the latest COVID-19 outbreak has taken that ‘digital desire’ several notches up. The pandemic has put digital transformation programs on steroids in today’s ‘remote everything’ world. Most companies are scurrying to redefine their business strategies and accommodate new plans to allow employees to work from home and continue to serve their customers in an uninterrupted manner. Stepping up to the challenge, Converge has taken an approach of consolidation in a world marked with demand for simple integrations and configuration management with products from different vendors. Each industry has specific requirements and Converge is making sure their applications and environments are production-ready to support clients’ businesses. “As more people are working remotely, there will be challenges in network and data security. This has prompted many firms to approach us to fill the gaps from these IT performance and security perspectives,” says Luftig. The innovative IT solutions and services provider helps firms react to risk-based alerts and uncover hidden insights and take action from a central location for foolproof security.

The company also has managed services and virtual desktop offerings that clients can leverage to optimize their operations. They can either run their IBM Power Systems instances on Converge’s cloud or IBM’s cloud. Additionally, Converge can support IBM software on-premise or help them migrate to the cloud.

As IBM expands beyond hardware and looks to a software-driven strategy, Converge, through its managed services, stands rock-solid to help companies that have invested significantly in IBM’s traditional technology products. The firm has the resources and the know-how to support clients in the areas of enterprise system architecture, storage and information management, business continuity, and disaster recovery.

“Our technical depth and breadth have been recognized by vendors, like IBM, who come to us for our skills to help them deliver better customer engagement and help train their employees in specialty areas,” says Vanita Patel, vice president of IBM Sales, Converge. “This is because of our focus on honing the skills and the culture that our technical resources are emboldened with.” From the leadership perspective, the company is positioned firmly to support clients and vendors with its technical expertise, sales know-how, and engagement strategy.

Having made its presence felt across North America, Converge is focused on catering to the IT needs of a broader clientele through its portfolio of firms. “We aim to be our clients’ most trusted technology partner on their journey while enhancing our cloud capabilities,” concludes Berard.

Converge Technology Solutions Corp. [TSXV:CTS]

Horizon Desktops in the Cloud

Friday, October 27, 2023

So, you want to run your desktops in the cloud? That’s great! We can help you navigate your public cloud options so your business can maximize the benefits that the cloud can bring to your organization. But hold on just a minute. Before we dive in headfirst, let’s take a step back and understand some of the nuances of running VMware Horizon in a public cloud. “Nuances?” you might ask. Absolutely! To start, make sure you have documented your business drivers and your technical and non-technical requirements for this move to the public cloud. Always make sure you have representation from both the technical and business side of your organization when declaring all your requirements, as this is key to a successful move to the cloud. While this article is not intended to cover design decisions for a Horizon public cloud deployment, we will discuss a couple for the purpose of integrating a few different services.

Now that you have your requirements defined, we can begin to help you understand the different public cloud options available for Horizon desktops. You might say, “I thought these public clouds were relatively the same?” Well, I know you hear this a lot, but the truth is: it depends! That’s why we start with business drivers and requirements, and then consider the nuances of the different public clouds. Although there are some similarities between them, they do not offer all the same options when it comes to Horizon desktops. Here are some considerations. Do you require or desire a Desktop as a Service (DaaS) offering or will you manage the Horizon infrastructure yourself? Are you using NSX features on-prem with your desktops today? Do you have a specific security requirement for the desktops provided by a 3rd party vendor? What software are you running within your desktop OS? Once these are answered, we can begin to help align your requirements to the different public cloud providers.

Today, I will be focusing on AWS, specifically, VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC on AWS). Although I won’t go into a lot of details on this offering, VMware Cloud on AWS is an integrated cloud offering jointly developed by AWS and VMware where you can run your vSphere workloads on AWS infrastructure that is managed by VMware. See here for more details.

Horizon Components

Let’s quickly review the components. The individual Horizon components will be the same as what you have running on-prem today. The exception could be if you are not currently using the Horizon Cloud Connector. For those of you that are new to Horizon, the following make up the Horizon infrastructure components:

• Horizon Cloud Connector

• Horizon Unified Access Gateways

• Horizon Connection Servers

• Load Balancer

• App Volumes

• VMs

For today’s discussion, we will be using the Cloud Connector, Connection Servers, and a Load Balancer.

Horizon Deployment Choices

For those of you who already run and support VMware Horizon today on-prem, deploying Horizon on VMC on AWS is similar. Let’s dive into the Horizon part a little more. There are two Horizon deployment options available to use with VMC on AWS as of today: the All-in SDDC Architecture and the Federated Architecture. The All-in SDDC option is what we will focus on and is similar to what you might already have deployed on-prem. For specific details on feature parity between Horizon on VMC on AWS and Horizon on-prem, see here.

The All-in SDDC architecture consists of deploying all the Horizon components inside the VMC on AWS Software Defined Data Center (SDDC). Your deployment choice will depend on your requirements. Below is a figure that shows the Logical Architecture diagram of the All-in SDDC deployment.

Availability and Scale

Think about how much scale will you need and what type of availability do you require for your Horizon desktops. If you are running Horizon today on-prem, you most likely have heard of the Pod and Block concepts for Horizon. If you’re not familiar, a Pod is made up of a group of interconnected Connection Servers that broker connections to desktops or published application. A block, on the other hand, is what provides the capacity to the Pod. Each block contains one or more vSphere clusters, including its own vCenter. How do you determine how many Pods and Blocks will you need? Let’s go back to those requirements you defined in the beginning. If you have a requirement to scale beyond the size of a single Pod, you can build out multiple Pods. Today, we are deploying a single Pod with one resource block. With VMC on AWS, the resource block will be a single SDDC per the recommendations from VMware to avoid any protocol traffic hair pinning between SDDCs.

Now let’s consider the availability question. If you have a requirement to provide redundancy beyond what a single Pod can provide, we can deploy another Horizon Pod into a different VMC on AWS availability zone or region. By leveraging multiple regions, we now are protected against any regional outages in AWS. Although not a common problem, Availability Zone (AZ) and regional outages can occur. For reference, VMware offers a 99.9% SLA for a VMC on AWS deployment in a single Availability Zone.

You might be asking, “If we deploy across different AZs or regions, how would we broker connections across multiple Horizon Pods?” Remember that scaling your Horizon resources could be within a single region for additional capacity beyond what 1 POD can provide or across regions for DR requirements. There are two options today: Horizon Universal Broker (UB) and Cloud Pod Architecture (CPA). We will be focused on the Universal Broker; however, Cloud Pod Architecture has been around for a while, and you might even be using this for your on-prem Horizon deployments. Further details around CPA can be found here.

Here’s a quick intro to Universal Broker. It’s a cloud-based brokering technology and is part of the Horizon Control Plane services found in the fully managed VMware Horizon Cloud service. Universal Broker provides the ability to broker multi-cloud assignments that span multiple Horizon pod deployments regardless of the underlying infrastructure. Universal Broker can also broker sessions based on where the user’s and pods are located. Additional information on Universal Broker can be found here.

Please note that the End of Life (EOL) date for the Horizon Cloud Service First-Gen Control Plane is currently targeted for Jan 31, 2024. Details about that announcement are located here. The Next-Gen Horizon Control plane is available; however, Universal Broker has not been added to it yet. So, for now you will need to continue to use the First-Gen Control plane and submit an exception request using the link located in the KB I posted. Below is a figure that shows Horizon internal users using Universal Broker with multi-site pods on VMC on AWS.

Load Balancing

We now need to discuss and decide what services will need to be load balanced. Will the users be accessing Horizon desktops only from the Internet using UAGs or only from your internal network with or without internal UAGs or some combination of these options? The answers to these questions should have been defined in your requirements.

For this article, I will be focused on internal-only access without internal UAGs. When using Horizon Universal Broker (UB) with the internal traffic-only use case without internal UAGs, a load balancer will not sit in front of the Connection Servers. UB talks directly with the Connection servers. For the rest of this article, I will be building out a design using UB with the internal-only use case.

Back to the load balancing topic. Does this mean you won’t need a load balancer at all for this deployment type? I’ll let you decide but let me explain a few things first. Placing a load balancer in front of the Horizon connection servers can still provide benefits, specifically when trying to mitigate the risks in this type of design. Currently, the Cloud Broker Client Service within the Horizon Cloud Connector (HCC), which supports UB, is only available on the Primary node, thus deploying an HCC cluster does not mitigate against this single point of failure.

So, what happens if you experience a problem with the HCC or the Horizon control plane? Depending on your design and how many PODs you have available, one option is to redirect your users to a different FQDN until the issue is resolved. That FQDN could be a load balancer in front of your connection servers.

Since we are using VMware Cloud on AWS, we have a few options for load balancers. We can leverage a native AWS load balancer, VMware’s Advanced load balancer (formerly AVI), or a 3rd party Load Balancer. For this article, I have selected the AWS Application Load Balancer (ALB). I have deployed the AWS ALB in a customer AWS account. To connect and route the load balancer traffic to and from our SDDC, I have deployed a VMware SDDC group and configured a peering attachment to my AWS Transit Gateway. We will continue to build off this design in the following section based on other requirements for my use case. Additional details around SDDC groups can be found here.

The AWS ALB will only load balance the primary XML-API protocol over HTTPS traffic. The secondary protocol connection or Phase 2 traffic will be directly between the Client and the Desktop, assuming there is no tunneling through the Connection Servers. If you have PCoIP requirements, a different design and configuration will be required. The following figure shows a high-level architecture with an integrated AWS ALB in a customer VPC. You could also deploy the ALB in the “Connected VPC”.

Networking and Security

Let’s go back to your requirements again. What are your connectivity requirements between your data center, end users, and the cloud? Where does your Internet egress and ingress point need to be? VMware Cloud on AWS includes NSX-T which handles all the networking functionality within the SDDC. NSX-T also has built in firewalling capabilities that are included with the current cost of this offering. Recently announced at Explorer 2023 Las Vegas, the NSX-T advanced firewall features will now be included for free. Some organizations can satisfy their requirements using the NSX-T firewall for their workloads, and if that applies to your organization, that’s great.

However, if you have specific requirements or existing skills with another firewall manufacturer, you can also leverage 3rd party firewalls deployed in AWS or a very limited use case deployed within VMC on AWS. For our discussion today, we are going to use a 3rd party firewall that we have deployed in AWS. While I won’t discuss a specific firewall vendor or the deployment of one now, Converge can help you navigate all your options and help you deploy the firewall(s) against best practices. Building off our deployment in this article, the following figure shows a 3rd party FW integrated with VMware Cloud on AWS.

Conclusion

As you can see from some of the technologies we briefly discussed today, we can now provide a comprehensive solution for your Horizon desktops to operate in the public cloud. While we only touched on a few specific design decisions today, different requirements can change your design and deployment choices. Always define your technical requirements up front along with any business requirements to ensure a smooth transition to public cloud. As we discussed, you can scale your Horizon deployment within the same AZ, across AZs or across regions based on your requirements and continue to integrate your additional VMware Cloud on AWS SDDCs and Horizon PODs building off this design.

Converge is here to help you navigate your public cloud options and to ensure your public cloud journey is a successful one.

The following figure shows the technologies we integrated at a high level with VMware Cloud on AWS throughout this article.

Celebrating Converge’s Sixth Anniversary

Monday, October 30, 2023

October is a special month for Converge. It’s a favorite season for many, with Halloween for the children, football and hockey seasons starting, and the anticipation of the many holidays to come, but for the Converge family it also marks another year as a company and another milestone of how far we’ve come. This year denotes six years since Converge was founded back in 2017, and it is amazing to watch what our teams continue to accomplish together every day.

As many know, Converge has historically been a company focused on growth by acquisition. From our founding to the start of this year, we’ve grown at a groundbreaking pace, acquiring 35 companies over the course of six years and enveloping thousands of new employees into the Converge family. In 2023, however, we turned our attention inwards, pivoting our focus towards organic growth, as well as the Company’s global transformation and integration of those 35 organizations into one Converge name, brand, and team. As we enter Q4, I’m proud to see how our employees have embraced this journey while keeping our foundational mentality of going to market with our ever-expanding solutions and services, driving organic growth, and truly showcasing the Converge brand with everyone they interact with. I’m also excited for the future, as there’s so much more growth on the horizon for Converge as one global company in 2024.

It also goes without saying, that I am immensely thankful for the Converge employees as we round out six years as an organization. We often refer to ourselves as the “Converge family” or within the context of our motto of “#BetterTogether”, but I don’t believe those phrases to be taken lightly. Growing from a company of just a few hundred to a few thousand is no small feat. Yet, due to the incredible drive, attitude, and camaraderie I’ve seen from every Converge employee, we’ve created a culture where I’m proud to work each day. We support one another, push each other further, and continually help our peers through challenges while celebrating our successes. Our focus on client and employee excellence is what has made us successful and what will continue to be our backbone as we move into the future.

To say it’s been a transformative six years would be quite the understatement. Whether facing the challenges of a start-up company, to pivoting during a global pandemic, to taking our brand global, we’ve succeeded because of who we are at our core – a company founded on the principles of integrity, unity, commitment, and excellence. As we round out 2023 and look towards 2024, I couldn’t be more excited for what’s to come or proud of where we’ve been and what we’ve accomplished together. Thank you to our partners, our customers, and our employees. You are our strength and the reason we have been able to celebrate so many achievements together over the past 6 years. I can’t wait to see what we accomplish next.

Company
Converge Technology Solutions Corp. [TSXV:CTS]

Management
Greg Berard, President and David Luftig, President, Northeast Region and Vanita Patel, Vice President of IBM Sales

Description
Converge Technology Solutions Corp. enables medium and large enterprises to achieve their business goals by helping them with the hybrid cloud, digital infrastructure, cybersecurity, and advanced analytics. Having acquired 12 regional IT solution providers and value-added resellers (VARs) in just three years since its founding, 9 of which are IBM-centric, Converge has established itself as a provider of state-of-the-art hybrid IT solutions, leveraging IBM products, and providing private managed services ranging from infrastructure management to business process operations. At the core of Converge’s success is its ability to provide a foundational IT infrastructure that acts as the launchpad for companies to go full throttle with their holistic transformation initiatives.

Converge Technology Solutions Corp. [TSXV:CTS] CTS]