A brief history...

Systems Architecture lies at the heart of Convergent’s origins, which stem from a gap in the corporate IT market for experienced systems architects and open systems programmers. Organisations were implementing and managing increasingly complex systems architectures to support huge ERP implementations, large-scale OLTP systems, data warehouse and decision support systems previously only run on mainframes. The gap lay between the “big 5” style Systems Integrators and ERP/Enterprise application vendors who were typically focused on the business application, often with little appreciation or experience of the underlying system infrastructure; and the hardware vendors, who were typically focused and skilled only in deploying their own hardware and operating systems.  A number of Convergent employees and some of the management team had previously worked in the 1990s for Sequent Computer Systems, who pioneered Symmetric Multi-Processing (SMP) a hardware architecture bringing mainframe power to the open systems market (Unix and later Microsoft NT).  Sequent enjoyed a particularly strong relationship with Oracle and this provided a unique and strong pedigree in very large-scale database and systems architecture design for the IT industry’s largest mission-critical OLTP and data warehouse systems outside the mainframe; as well as in performance tuning and benchmarking large-scale applications and systems.  It also introduced mainframe-class systems management, batch scheduling, security solutions and managed services for managing these complex large-scale client-server environments.  

As centralised client-server architectures evolved to more sophisticated 3-tier (application server, database server, client) and distributed n-tier architectures, systems became more scalable, distributing load over multiple specialised server nodes, increasing overall systems performance and reliability. However, corporate IT environments, architectures and management became far more heterogeneous and complex with different hardware, operating systems, databases and security capabilities deployed for different tiers and functions.  This distributed complexity cause an explosive growth in two markets from the mid-to-late 1990s. Firstly, the Enterprise Systems Management market, where a number of Convergent employees worked for leading providers such as Tivoli (now IBM Tivoli) and BMC (Patrol) -  we still implement or  integrate with these products today in a number of our corporate clients.   Secondly, distributed computing also drove the introduction of new middleware, EAI solutions and technology standards to allow integration and interoperability of applications and processes running on different servers and operating systems across a network, and increasingly across extra-nets and the Internet.

Today, most clients in a client-server architecture are web browsers on PCs or mobile devices and distributed and federated computing has reached new levels of popularity with Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) instantiated as Web Services and various XML standards. This market is being driven by the large middleware vendors and the strategic SOA-based practices of the large System Integrators.   SOA principles of a well defined services contract, abstraction, loose coupling, reusability, discovery, composition and governance are driving both operational IT projects and major longer term strategic IT re-architecture and industrialisation programmes encompassing both mainframe core-processing and client-server environments. 

SOA adoption ranges from wrapping and exposing legacy functionality and business processes as web services; to Service Oriented integration projects often manifested as an Enterprise Service Bus – middleware vendors have updated their EAI offerings to enable web service connectivity on their event or message-based backbone, supporting standards such as BPEL, an XML scripting language used to define, execute and orchestrate business processes using multiple web services.   SOA principles are also being adopted by Enterprise architecture initiatives, typically found in the central architecture groups of larger corporate IT organisations.  These describe and model an organisation’s current and/or future processes, structure, actors and information systems using models such as the Zachman Framework, with the aim of aligning business strategy with IT investment and driving common approaches and interoperability across the enterprise. 

Today’s systems architect requires broad experience and expertise in a huge range of systems, technologies, standards, tools and methodologies.  Convergent has both the knowledge and broad experience gained over the last 20 years in blue-chip corporate IT organisations to help clients with most aspects of IT architecture, design and implementation.