Pellera Technologies CEO On Driving ‘End-To-End’ Offering For Modern IT, Security
In an interview with CRN, Pellera CEO Greg Berard says the company has emerged from the combination of Converge Technology Solutions and Mainline Information Systems as a ‘go-to solution provider’ with key differentiators across all the major IT categories.
Pellera Technologies has emerged from the combination of Converge Technology Solutions and Mainline Information Systems as a comprehensive solution and service provider with key differentiators across all the major categories of IT and cybersecurity, Pellera CEO Greg Berard told CRN.
Backed by investment firm H.I.G Capital, Pellera Technologies is the new name for the company formed through bringing together Converge, No. 32 on CRN’s Solution Provider 500 for 2025, with Mainline to create a company that has 3,200 employees and saw $4 billion in total revenue in 2024. The deal closed in April and Pellera launched its new brand last week.
The Tallahassee, Fla.-based company now offers core practice areas in multiple fast-growing segments with a focus on data and AI, app modernization, cloud, cybersecurity and data center technologies.
Going forward, Pellera’s key differentiator in the market “is our ability to be the go-to solution provider, from an end-to-end perspective, with deep skills,” Berard said in an interview.
“We can now offer that full suite of solutions,” he said. And ultimately, “the diversified portfolio, the diversified skills and capabilities, the deep relationships we have with both our clients and our partners, will continue to make us a major player in the North American market and be one of the largest solution providers across the board.”
Within cybersecurity, Pellera is finding strong traction with key vendors including CrowdStrike, Arctic Wolf and IBM, as well as data security vendors such as Rubrik and Cohesity. The company’s cybersecurity practice has also been bolstered by Converge’s string of more than 30 acquisitions in recent years as well as Mainline’s acquisition of EITS (Enterprise IT Security), a major partner of vendors including Palo Alto Networks, just over a year ago.
Speaking with CRN, Berard pointed to identity and access management — as well as governance, risk and compliance — as other key focus areas for Pellera looking ahead.
What follows is an edited portion of CRN’s interview with Berard.
What do you see as the biggest takeaways for the market about the combining of the two companies and the rebrand as Pellera?
The biggest thing for us is, as we're coming together with [the two companies] and backed by H.I.G, we're now able to take a step back and really be more strategic and make sure we're making the right investments for our customers.[We can] make sure we're building out the right skills and capabilities. The technology landscape continues to change and the combination with Mainline continues to make us more diversified. We believe it's important to be diversified across not only the strategic OEMs in the market, but also across the skills and capabilities that we need to provide for our customers. When we were building out the foundation for Pellera we really looked at, how do we continue to be that differentiated and end-to-end provider for our clients? And we can now offer that full suite of solutions. The diversified portfolio, the diversified skills and capabilities, the deep relationships we have with both our clients and our partners, will continue to make us a major player in the North American market and be one of the largest solution providers across the board.
What are the biggest differentiators for Pellera in the market?
The biggest thing is our ability to be the go-to solution provider, from an end-to-end perspective, with deep skills. It’s the deep technical expertise we bring to the table across data and AI, across app modernization and cloud, across cybersecurity — and leveraging the skillsets we have internally to really drive the thought leadership for our customers from start to finish. There are a lot of partners out there that invest in the pre-sales side or the managed services side. But having the size and scale that we have, having the deep technical expertise and thought leadership we have — and our ability to advise, implement and manage the customer environments long term — is really what differentiates us in the marketplace. Pellera is now going to be one of the largest solution providers in North America. Being privately held and having the backing of H.I.G is only going to allow us to continue to make the right strategic investments for our clients. We're going to be able to accelerate the solutions we're building. We're going to be able to drive those business outcomes and really deepen the cybersecurity skills we have, the AI skills we have, and continue to make sure we put our money where the clients are investing, so that we can continue to be that go-to-partner for them for years to come.
How has your cybersecurity strategy evolved?
When you think about the overall cybersecurity practice we built up within Converge, early on, it was your traditional network security capabilities. We had some SIEM capabilities and relationships with IBM, CrowdStrike, Cisco. But we acquired a company called CBI in March 2021, and they were a true cybersecurity partner that had relationships with everybody from Arctic Wolf to CrowdStrike to, nowadays, Rubrik and Cohesity. And combining forces with Mainline, we now have an even broader portfolio when it comes to cybersecurity. We have the ability to talk to our customers about everything from data protection and data encryption to identity and access management. We've built up strong partnerships with Okta and SailPoint and the IBM Verify stack. We just won Arctic Wolf Partner of the Year. So we continue to build strong partnerships with the Arctic Wolfs and CrowdStrikes of the world.
What are some other key capabilities or vendors you’re working with in the security space?
[One is] data management and data protection — being able to layer on top of our data center capabilities with some of the traditional storage partners that are now rebranding themselves as security organizations — Cohesity, Rubrik, Pure Storage. And on top of that, when you think about the data center partnerships we've had for a number of years, we’re making sure we're talking about network security and growing the footprint with Palo Alto [Networks] and Fortinet and and others. So our portfolio, from a cybersecurity platform perspective, has grown. Mainline had acquired a company called EITS (Enterprise IT Security), so they are now part of the overall Pellera cybersecurity practice as well. The combination of the two firms will give us even more of a presence from a cyber perspective, and you'll see us continue to make investments in that space. One of the areas that we invested in, 18 months ago, was the identity and access management arena. We continue to do a lot with our customers around risk and compliance. We have a very strong governance team as well — [including] penetration testing with our customers and making sure we're helping them with incident response.
When it comes to SIEM, is that serving as the backbone of any managed security services that you're delivering?
When you think about our overall portfolio, [it’s] everything from advisory services to implementation to managed services. [With] cybersecurity, we've built out a number of advisory offerings around, do you have the right identity and access management platform? What's your IAM roadmap? What are you doing from a governance perspective? But also from a managed services perspective, we offer managed SIEM services around the IBM platform and around Microsoft Sentinel. And then we partner with companies like Arctic Wolf and CrowdStrike to offer those services, more from a product perspective, versus our own management. One of the other areas we’ve built out is managed services around data protection. We've taken the IBM Guardium stack and we have a managed services offering around that. We work with a number of large financial and insurance clients to help them manage that long term. And we continue to make some investments with some of the other platforms out there.