Financial services provider consolidates IT to reduce complexities across new acquisitions

One of the largest and fastest-growing financial services companies was expanding through multiple acquisitions, the most recent of which doubled the organization's size. It now owned entities across the Americas, EMEA and Asia Pacific with disparate IT footprints and had a growing need to simplify its ecosystem. The company was also approaching the end of a contract with one of its technology vendors and needed expert advice on proceeding with a new vendor that was compatible across multiple technology areas and OEMs. It turned to WWT to help identify and quickly adopt the best mix of solutions and services to support its growth, reduce complexities by consolidating technology vendors and deliver better business outcomes.

The Solution

WWT experts met with key company stakeholders to help prioritize goals and determine the most ideal solutions to support the company's efforts. 

Since the company continually sought to provide cutting-edge technology and support bots for its internal and external customers, it decided to expand upon the array of Fortinet solutions the company already had in its existing environment, adding new Fortinet systems to optimize its capabilities as needed.

Consolidating its service contract, the company included FortiGate NGFW— the only NGFW with unified management for hybrid mesh firewall. As the world's most deployed network firewall, FortiGate NGFW delivers unmatched AI-powered security, threat intelligence, complete visibility and networking convergence. 

FortiConverter brought automated migration service to simplify the transition to FortiGate NGFW. WWT also recommended FNDN, FortiGuard, FortiGate Cloud and FortiOS.

Like many organizations that depend on an OEM to provide L4 technical support and fast response times, the company engaged WWT and Fortinet for FortiCare Professional Services to help deploy, operate and maintain the technologies to optimize results.

Because of WWT's knowledge, expertise and collaborative assistance, the company could rely on WWT for future deployments across multiple technology areas and OEMs. This trust brought greater efficiency to the purchasing process.  

Overall, WWT helped the company:

• Evaluate its current spend with existing integrator partners
• Assess historical value-add from the integrator (VAR) community
• Evaluate the technological depth and breadth of existing integrators based on a system of weighted selection criteria
• Establish downstream success metrics for newly selected integration partners

Outcomes & Benefits

The financial services company gained many significant benefits, including a collaborative, knowledgeable IT integration partner that keeps IT consolidation and ROI needs front and center. The company expects a 10 percent+ year-over-year savings. 

WWT and Fortinet also delivered ahead of schedule, which meant the company could provide its customers with steady, secure service.

Fortinet is a global organization with the depth and breadth to provide the technical expertise to ensure successful deployment. Combined with WWT's vast experience, the partnership ensured the company's success and consistent integration and experience around the globe, wherever and whenever the company needed it. 

Moreover, the company was set up for unlimited growth with successful vendor consolidation and a streamlined IT stack that allowed it to be lean and agile—empowering it to move its legacy technology from on-premises to the cloud as needed. 

How we did it

WWT helped the financial services company:

• Identify current and future issues, needs, processes and technologies
• Simplify and manage the technology selection process, consolidating vendors across multiple IT technologies and numerous lines of business.
• Inform its decisions with insight and experience based on a deep understanding of the company's business needs
• Integrate and drive the adoption of those technologies for faster time-to-completion and improved ROI

How we can help you

WWT helps organizations meet their current and future goals by embracing change and leveraging powerful technologies in the data center, in the cloud, at the edge and beyond, including Fortinet solutions.

WWT helps companies develop infrastructure that adapts and scales without compromising security or performance so you stay competitive and sustainable no matter what tomorrow brings. That includes:

• Data center technologies
• Network security
• Cloud computing
• Security Transformation
• Automation and integration
• Digital workspace
• AI and data
• ESG
• Mobility

If your organization needs to consolidate its IT vendors, you can benefit from working with WWT as experts with decades of experience across multiple industries and in all areas of IT. We deliver a positive, collaborative experience.

Because of our depth and breadth of services and solutions and our global presence, we offer consistency and predictability wherever you need to operate. 

Leverage our Advanced Technology Center (ATC) to test any solutions you are considering before purchasing. We have a full range of Fortinet offerings, including Fortinet Secure SD-WAN, Next Generation Firewall, Digital Experience Monitoring, etc., plus hundreds of other technology solutions from valued OEM partners.

Our facilities include a robust physical lab environment—accessible digitally—that enables you to make smart technology decisions fast and mitigate the risk inherent in solving complex business challenges with even more complex technology solutions.

• Design and deploy multi-vendor technology solutions
• Build foundational knowledge around specific products and technologies
• Explore and compare integrations between vendors and keep pace with new feature releases
• Evaluate new technologies to determine if they will work with your current infrastructure
• Validate proofs of concept to discover the art of the possible

About WWT & Fortinet

As an authorized expert partner, WWT collaborates with Fortinet to navigate market evolution with security-driven networking. Traditional networking lacks awareness of content, applications, users, devices, location, and more. Organizations have overlaid security solutions to account for this shortcoming—but doing so has led to increased management complexity, performance bottlenecks, poor user experience, and the potential introduction of new exploitable gaps or vulnerabilities. WWT and Fortinet provide our customers with a better approach that converges networking and security into a single, accelerated solution.