2016 Predictions or Trends

by Jeff Garell

I’ve never done a predictions post before – mainly because it’s really just guessing and the predictions are usually so obvious as to make them, well, not really predictions or they’re so out there that you it’ll require unicorns and rainbows to come true.

So as I start this, I have no idea how it will turn out. Hopefully interesting enough to keep your attention – many of these have been on prediction articles year after year. That’s mostly because these technologies or solutions are continuing to mature and gain adoption. I think we can consider this post more about trends than predictions.

Cloud adoption will continue to rise as Hewlett Packard exits the hosting market and competition heats up among Amazon (the 800-pound gorilla), Microsoft and Google. I think Microsoft has been doing all of the right things with Azure by adding support for Linux servers, and there is a future in docker-style container technologies. Microsoft’s offering has become very reliable and stable, and I believe that its experience in this arena has led to vast improvements in its most recent server operating systems. But Amazon is still the one to beat, given its long head start, continued improvements and new service offerings. The one knock I hear on Amazon is that it’s easy to get your stuff into an Amazon solution but moving back to premises-based is very difficult. This is the main reason HP (now HP Enterprise) bought Eucalyptus. We’ll continue to see businesses large and small move workloads into the cloud. Even more exciting to me is the hybrid cloud concept, where workloads can be moved from your on-premises infrastructure to the cloud and back.

Mobility and BYOD use will increase as more and more of our everyday thick applications become apps. This has an impact on security, accessibility, infrastructure and policy. Not necessarily in that order, but that’s unfortunately the order that things get considered, especially in the small to low-mid sized organizations. Do you have a mobile device/BYOD policy in place and the controls to enforce the policy? For example, do you allow your employees access to corporate information - even simply email - from their personal cell phone and how do respond when they lose that phone or simply go in for their upgrade replacement? Policies like enabling encryption, the ability to remotely wipe the device if it’s lost or stolen or the simple process of having someone wipe the corporate data (emails, documents, etc) when someone leaves your company. This will also drive the need to adopt a more robust and secure wireless infrastructure in order to support these addition wireless only devices.

Many of these trends are being driven more and more by the millennial workforce. These new entrants to the job market are more technically savvy (as users at least) than previous generations, and they’ve grown up not really knowing a time before the Internet. They generally don’t need end-user training on how to use a computer or search for information, which is certainly a positive trait. However, they have certain expectations on how things can/should operate. That convoluted home-grown Microsoft access application that you built in the 1990s probably won’t hold much interest and may generally drive them crazy. Prepare yourself for the requests that may drive you to adopt the previous two paragraphs trends.

Security will continue to be a problem, and there will still be no silver bullet. At least weekly, I read about someone’s lost/stolen laptop exposing personal data on thousands of customers/clients/patients. This is a policy problem. Most security issues are made possible by a policy problem. The first question you should be asking yourself is “What kind of data is my employees taking off the premises and why?” – and then you can develop policies and procedures (mixed with a little technology) to mitigate as much of the risk as possible. Some simple things can be done to protect your data that travels, such as either full-disk encryption or even encrypted “containers” that will hold your proprietary or personal information. In addition, there will continue to be breaches and denial-of-service attacks both large and small. I also expect the state-sponsored types of attacks to continue.

Converged and hyper-converged systems will increasingly become the preferred solution. For many applications and use cases, deploying these systems is the right answer. Easily deployed and expanded as well as being quite dense, they can offer a tremendous savings in rack space and power requirements. For example, HPE’s CS-250 has four servers (nodes) in a 2U footprint. Which can translate to 84 servers in one 42U rack – and these include the storage as well. In addition, it would make for a great Remote-Office/Branch-Office (ROBO) or retail location solution.

Well there ya go – that turned out a little better than I thought it would, given that it’s a predictionstrends post. In a shameless plug, I’d like to say that CTG stands ready and able to discuss or demonstrate all of these technologies and more. Just give us a call.

I hope you and your loved ones have a wonderful holiday and safe and happy new year!

Jeff Garell is co-founder of Convergent Technologies Group.

Celebrating CTG’s Milestones of 2015

By John Monahan

As we enter the final weeks of each calendar year, I always remind myself to take a moment and reflect on our successes. Our team at Convergent Technologies Group dedicated much hard work to delivering great solutions for our clients over the past 12 months, and it paid off in so many ways for our company.

Let me share some significant highlights of 2015:

• We celebrated our 10^thanniversary in November. We were brave souls when we opened up shop in Jeff’s basement down in the Fan a decade ago, but we had a great combination of IT expertise, market experience and passion to create our business. Yes, we put much effort in continuing to build our talent and refining our business model, and we know that some of that credit goes to our valued clients, who recognize that CTG is the right IT partner for them.

• We earned recognition as a Hewlett Packard Enterprise Premium Partner. This was the culmination of years of training and education, as our people mastered every component of HPE’s converged infrastructure portfolio. This elite designation demonstrates that we have a rare level of expertise, along with unprecedented access to the great minds at HPE. Even more important is that our people continue to delve into opportunities to earn more industry-leading certifications, because we are never satisfied with the status quo.

• We welcomed new customers. Each and every customer comes to us with a unique challenge or opportunity, and we develop the IT strategy that hits the mark today and will scale as that business grows. Each year, our proven experience and expertise has allowed us to attract market-leading companies with increasingly more complex IT questions. As we’ve faced tougher challenges, our team has crafted strong, inventive and meaningful solutions that are powering growth.

• We added new products and services to our portfolio. I doubt that any industry faces as much innovation as Information Technology, where something that might be only a dream at the first of the year can be a proven product by the end of the year. Our customers know that we remain committed to staying ahead and bringing new opportunities that will become competitive advantages for them. And we expanded our Solutions Lab, where clients can visit our office to see nearly every product in a configurable environment – so you can test out new technologies and make smart investments that work for you.

What makes me most proud is that we accomplished all that by working together as a team, and we have a solid foundation for continuing to make CTG a sought-after IT partner in the year ahead. We are doing a better job of telling the CTG story, with a greater social media presence, expanded blog posts and a revamped Web site that will launch in early 2016. All that effort is generating results that speak for themselves, as our company has once again delivered on our ambitious year-over-year goals.

As you reflect on your successes in 2015, all of us at Convergent Technologies Group wish you the warmest holiday greetings and a prosperous new year.

John Monahan is a co-founder of Convergent Technologies Group.

Enhanced Web Site Will Better Tell the CTG Story

By Alexandra Suder

Nothing makes our team at CTG happier than sitting down with a customer or potential prospect and explaining how we can help deliver the technology that will power their business.

But sometimes we don’t have that in-person opportunity.

That makes how we showcase our expertise and experience on our Web site an integral ingredient in telling our story. Much as CTG has grown up over the past 10 years, so has our Web site. Unfortunately, it’s been a bit of a patchwork process, as we added new services to the site at the same time as we added them to our portfolio of offerings.

Now that we’ve celebrated our this milestone anniversary, we’re getting ready to unveil our present to ourselves: A freshly overhauled Web site that better shares how CTG can be the competitive edge for your business.

Our team has been working throughout this quarter on understanding what has worked on the Web site and on identifying gaps. Armed with that insight:

• We are shifting our focus to showcase how our services work for you. We believe that this helps you better understand how new technologies deliver meaningful benefits.

• We are continuing to share our expertise. The site will introduce white papers, product videos and webinars – all available to you at a click or two. We’re also integrating our blog and social media channels, so you can keep up with the latest in our industry and at CTG.

• We are better telling our story. You’ll learn more about the CTG vision, which aligns largely with that of our primary partner, Hewlett Packard Enterprise. No matter the size of your business, we are committed to deploying the right IT for you.

Right now, we’re in the design stage, with the goal of launching the new site early in the new year.

The enhanced Web site is part of a renewed focus on our marketing efforts. In the year ahead, you can expect to be invited to participate in learning events both at CTG and at our partner venues. We are continuing to expand our social media presence. And we are always looking to offer fun opportunities for our clients to network, as we know that great ideas sometimes happen outside the office.

Alexandra Suder is CTG’s director of marketing.

Our Employees Share How They’re Thankful

As we wish each and every one of you a Happy Thanksgiving, we wanted to share the many different reasons that our CTG team members are thankful this year:

Grace SunDance, administrative assistant:

“I am thankful for the amazing opportunity that Convergent Technologies Group has given me, and everything that they continue to give. I am also very thankful for my two compassionate, loving, and caring beagles, Odie and Cabella.”

Jeff Joyner, network architect:

“I'm thankful for my wonderful family and having a passion for my chosen vocation.”

Scott Haizlip, SMB account manager

 “I am thankful for my beautiful fiancé, Christi, our golden retriever, Ranger, and for all of the help and opportunities CTG has given me.”

Chastity Loving, purchasing manager

“I’m thankful for my two children and for loving everything in and about my life.”

Alexandra Suder, marketing director:

“I’m thankful for my mother and father, my two sisters, Julz and Camille, my brother-in-law, Tom, and my boyfriend, Kevin. I am so thankful for our pets, Maverick and Malo, and for each and every one of my guardian angels (furry or not) watching and protecting me. I am so thankful for CTG and for the intelligent and amazing people I work with. I’m thankful for being excited to go to work every day and for loving my job. I’m thankful for all of my friends and family – close or far, new, old or rekindled – because their positivity, support, generosity and kindness has shaped me and helped me discover who I am, which has allowed me to better myself.”

Brandon Samuel, assistant manager:

“I’m thankful for the growth and relationships that I have built while at CTG, as well as the flexibility and personal understanding that CTG provides.”

John Monahan, co-founder:

“I am thankful for my staff, and all their hard work. I am thankful for the year that CTG has had and our accomplishments. I am thankful for my family!”

Jeff Garell, co-founder:

“I'm thankful for the many opportunities I have been afforded in my life and those that gave them to me.

“I'm thankful to be living in a country that offers the ability to take your life in any direction and to any height (or depth) you choose.

“I'm thankful for the generations and generations of brave men and women who have given us the ability to make those choices.

“I'm thankful for the rights that give everyone the voice to say what they want and for me to choose whether to agree or not.

“I'm thankful for everyone I've ever worked with and the examples, good or bad, I've witnessed and learned from.

“I'm enormously thankful to have two beautiful, intelligent and caring daughters that have changed my life so dramatically for the better. They have plumbed the depths of my heart further than I ever thought possible.

“And most importantly, I'm thankful for my wife without whom I would be a much lesser man.  Who showed me that the third time really is the charm.”

Solutions Lab Lets You See IT in Action

By Jeff Garell

Nearly every new technology acquisition is surrounded by unanswered questions, hopeful expectations and more than a little nervous concern before the purchase order is signed. Will this perform the way my sales guy says it will? Is this a gamble? How much will this change our operational processes? Should I update my resume just in case?

Yeah, I've been on both sides of that thought process in the past 33 years, first as the purchaser and now as the provider and consultant. There is a lot of gut-check that happens on that road depending on the scope of the change, the criticality or newness of the service needed, or sometimes just the dollars involved. We all have customers and don't want to let them down.

For these reasons and many more, CTG has been building up an infrastructure that will hopefully ease some of these concerns about potential RGEs (Resume-Generating Events).

Currently in our Solutions Lab, we have a variety of gear that lets us either demonstrate the potential and advantages of various tech or configure and use to mirror your planned infrastructure. The Solutions Lab currently houses the following “toys:”

• C7000 Bladesystem with 10 Blades and VirtualConnect 20/40 Modules 
• HP StoreServ 7200 with both 10GB iSCSI and FiberChannel connects (currently FlatSAN connected to the C7000). The StoreServ has 2 tiers of storage, FastClass (10k SAS) and NearLine (7.2k SAS).
• HP 5900 Core Switch with 48 10GB ports and 2x40GB ports that each connect to the StoreServ and to the BladeSystem for some pretty blazing throughput.
• Proliant DL360p with 3TB of internal disk and 196GB RAM. We often use this for onsite Proof of Concept (PoC) when you want to keep your information at your own site. These PoC are generally function-based more than performance-based. 
• OneView/IMC gives us the management and monitoring we need to keep things humming along smoothly.

This setup has allowed us to not only quickly reconfigure for a variety of customer challenges but also keeps us proficient on the platforms we stand behind. This has served us well for several years, but the times they are a-changing.

The current trends regarding the expansion of cloud adoption includes the growing understanding that often the cloud is really just another resource and may not be the full solution for everyone. The things we all like about cloud-based infrastructure is that we can shortcut the acquisition process by simply logging in to a portal and clicking a few buttons. A few minutes later we have a server spun up. I'll save the economics and potential lock-in conversation for another post, but I will stipulate that the speed and efficiency in firing up infrastructure is incredibly enticing. Thus the hybrid cloud is born.

With that in mind, we have begun the process of retooling our Solutions Lab. (You were wondering when I was gonna get back to this topic, weren't you?) We're adding several components listed below, but we will be augmenting the infrastructure with HP's Helion products that will include an OpenStack based set of services, Cloud Service Automation/Operations Orchestration (for that nice clickety-click spin up a server feel), as well as Eucalyptus that will allow us to seamlessly move workloads back and forth from our infrastructure to Amazon Web Services and back. The "and back" is what makes Eucalyptus full of awesome. Of course, we'll have accounts setup at both Amazon and Microsoft's Azure in order to demonstrate the hybrid-cloudiness.

In addition to being able to demonstrate hybrid-cloud and automation capabilities, the new setup will let us prepare for your demo workloads even faster. To facilitate this, we will be augmenting our lab with:

• HP StoreServ 8000 series - All Flash Array
• HP CS-250 Converged System
• Dual HP 16GB Fiber Channel Switches
• A pile of HP Helion Software
• HP Aruba Wireless

We'll also have the ability to demonstrate HP Catalyst, StoreOnce (Virtual Appliance), Veeam, and a variety of Fortinet products both physical and virtual.

So to sum up, we're working hard to reduce the stress, uncertainty and general guesswork that comes with any of these strategic technology changes we all get to shepherd. I'll continue to provide updates as we get the gear and integrate it into our Solutions Lab. If you see anything I've missed or that you would be interested in seeing, just drop me a line at jgarell@ctgva.com.

Jeff Garell is a co-founder of Convergent Technologies Group.

Celebrating Our Milestone 10th Anniversary

By Jeff Garell

Flash back 10 years ago, and I remember the fledgling days of our business that we first operated out of my basement, which was lovingly referred to as The Bunker. I was living in an 80-year-old house in Richmond Museum District, and if you've ever seen a movie where London is getting bombed and everyone hides in the underground, it was kind of like that. Pretty dark, a little cold in the winter and a little warm in the summer.

When John and I finally moved into “real offices,” it felt like our business was growing up. Of course, like most people's first apartments, our home for the business was not in a glamorous part of town. In fact, our neighbors in adjacent buildings included a parole office and methadone clinic.

We had a very conservative growth and spending plan in that we wouldn’t take on debt just to build quickly. We saw far too many in our industry spend themselves into bankruptcy. Besides just not wanting to lose the company, we feel an absolute obligation to our employees and can proudly say in 10 years we’ve never had to lay someone off, reduce pay or downsize because of financial difficulty.

Since that first office, we've moved a few more times – always to a little better location with a little more room for our growing number of employees. We landed at our current location about five years ago and just recently expanded to nearly double our existing space. 

We can look back fondly at the challenges and the risks and the excitement that comes from being in startup mode. But I assure you there were times that we wondered if we would make it, if we would be working for someone else again, if we could afford to add a much-needed employee, and if we would ever get a full night’s sleep again.

As we celebrate our 10^th anniversary this month, we wanted to share some important ingredients in our success.

We’ve developed a core network for our business.

We’ve had a lot of help and guidance along the way from our distributors and manufacturers as we navigated the rocky shoals of our growth. For that, we’ll always indebted and grateful to them. 

We’ve continued to invest in our knowledge.

Without question, this is an ever-changing industry. When we opened our doors, we were guiding our clients through windows-based solutions and hardwired networks; today, we’re in cloud discussions and looking at more creative ways to increase security for those businesses. We’ve grown with those partners and we’ve earned a competitive edge by staying at the leading edge, so we can deliver the best.

We’ve proven ourselves with our customers.

I can't say enough about our customers, many of whom have trusted us for more than the 10 years CTG has been in business. Without them, we most certainly wouldn’t have made it to this milestone. We will continue to earn your trust as we all move forward into the future.

We’ve built a solid team that delivers every day.

I can't even begin to adequately thank and recognize our amazing employees, who bring our vision to life everyday in their work with our clients. Many of our people have been with us for more than five years, with several reaching the eight- and nine-year mark. Without question, they are our not-so-secret weapon in this first 10-year run, and we are grateful for having the opportunity to work with each and every one.

We’re ready for the next 10 years.

As we look to the future, we will continue to offer what we hope are the best solutions, services and support to help our customers continue their own growth story. I can assure you that we revel in our customers’ successes more than our own, because that demonstrates that we are delivering value with our IT leadership and work. Thank you all for your part in helping us reach this milestone.

Jeff Garell is a co-founder of Convergent Technologies Group.

Major Deals, Splits Will Transform IT Industry

By Brandon Samuel

Anyone who has been reading our blog posts or following CTG on social media channels knows by now that Nov. 1 will mark the end of one era and the beginning of a new one for HP. While the news will usher in a new era in technology, it has not been the most impactful news of this month – at least not in the eyes of the end user.

Last week, Dell announced its purchase of EMC, after reaching a $67 billion agreement. In this most expensive technology purchase in history, two giants in the IT world are coming together at a time when our industry as a whole is in the midst of a major shift. As with any big news in my industry, I spent much time after hearing the news going over the pros and cons of the deal, with hopes of better understanding how it would affect my goals of making Convergent Technologies Group and HP the platinum standard in manufacturer/reseller relationships.

When I meet with clients who use Dell products within their infrastructure, I always ask two questions: What do you like about buying Dell? And what do you dislike about it? The answers – although often varying in length – are almost always the same. Clients like the fact that Dell has a direct purchasing model because they believe that they are getting better discounts because of that agreement. Their dislikes always center on support, whether it be for warranty issues or implementation of new solutions.

Along with the Dell-EMC announcement came another announcement that I believe is equally important. Dell and CDW announced a partnership that will allow CDW to begin selling Dell products, virtually eliminating the direct model that so many customers are so fond of. Dell is not well-known to have a strong reseller focus, and this shift will have major impacts on clients who aren’t fond of change. Perhaps the reason behind the deal is that HP’s numbers with CDW were down 6 percent over the past year, a result, in my opinion, of HP’s increased focus on bringing deals to partners such as CTG that bring value throughout the entire sales process.

You might be asking yourself, “How does the merger affect either of these things? Shouldn’t two goliaths in the IT world coming together be a good thing for EMC and Dell clients alike?” Not from our market analysis.

The deal between Dell and EMC is one that has major financial ramifications. At $67 billion, the deal could prove very costly in the short term. Dell will be responsible for paying upward of $2.5 billion dollars annually in interest alone, which will cause a major disruption when it comes to support and R&D, both areas in which Dell has struggled as of late. You must also take into account that these are two very large companies coming together, with very different sales models. The integration of products and sales/service teams will be time consuming and cause major interruptions for the combining businesses for some time. In short, I believe that it will take these companies quite a bit of time to get it right, leaving the door open for companies such as HP to show the value that their products and partnerships can bring to the table, particularly for clients that have flown the Dell flag for quite some time.

Dell has always been a strong company with a loyal following. The move to purchase EMC has allowed them to expand its Enterprise storage portfolio with an EMC product that has been one of the top three Tier 1 solutions for many years. However, the EMC solution has become stagnant of late, as can be noticed by HP’s 3Par offering earning top ratings for the past two years. This deal will likely to cause loyal EMC customers to take a look at their architecture, which could likely lead to an increase in conversations around 3Par. I look forward to the challenges that this merger will create in the long term and am excited for HP Enterprise to take the lead across all major Data Center infrastructure portfolios.


Brandon Samuel is assistant manager of Convergent Technologies Group.