Building A Billion-Dollar Solution Provider One Acquisition At A Time 

Finding good sales staff, engineers and support personnel is already difficult enough for most solution providers. Trying to find even one or two data scientists, cybersecurity experts and cloud services gurus can be nearly impossible for all but the largest of channel partners. So what is a solution provider to do?

Shaun Maine, CEO of Converge Technology Solutions, said he has found the answer. His company was founded five years ago with the express purpose of building an IT solution provider powerhouse capable of tackling the most demanding customer challenges, including digital transformation and cloud migration, by acquiring other solution providers. The Toronto-based company has in five years acquired 31 companies, the latest being San Diego-based TIG, with the goal of developing enterprise-grade skills and making them available to the midsize customers those 31 solution providers could never provide on their own.

Maine told CRN in an exclusive interview that few solution providers can afford the investment needed to bring much-needed skills to customers, but as a group Converge can.

“[Most solution providers] might have a Microsoft practice,” he said. “But do they have an AWS practice or GCP [Google Cloud Platform] practice? We‘ve got 103 security architects averaging 15 years of experience in our security group. We’ve got 85 data scientists in our analytics group. Those kinds of skill sets, you don‘t see at VARs. And then our cloud practice has all these app modernization people that are helping people put their applications inside Kubernetes containers from Red Hat and VMware and add managed services.”

For Converge, acquisitions are essential to building the kind of talent that will make it a billion-dollar provider of IT services in the next couple of years, Maine said.

“We believe that the team will always beat an individual, no matter how bright they are,” he said. “So we‘re really emphasized that team mentality, and the way that we’ve been bringing on talent is by buying companies rather than hiring individuals. ... When you hire by ones and twos, they‘re not a team. And it takes a while for them to embed in a team. When you buy a company, they’re already a team.”

Here is more on how Maine is building Converge through acquisitions.