Celebrating 25 Years of Helping Organizations Achieve Digital Transformation

On Aug. 25, FNTS celebrated 25 years of helping organizations expedite and achieve digital transformation to improve business processes and productivity. In celebration, the State of Nebraska proclaimed Aug. 25 as Cloud Technology Day.

“I’d like to thank the State of Nebraska for recognizing the importance of cloud technology. Millions of Americans are embracing and utilizing the growing role of technology in how we work and learn remotely as a result of COVID-19, and cloud technology is playing a key component in making this possible,” FNTS President Kim Whittaker said. “Investing in public, private and/or hybrid cloud technology, remote learning capabilities and web-based solutions is critical in advancing business, education and sustaining the economy.”

FNTS attributes its longevity to its consultative and collaborative approach to organizations and developing customized IT solutions that result in long-term cost savings. FNTS assist clients by advising, building, migrating and managing their cloud infrastructure, allowing them to pay on a usage-based model instead of having to own and operate their own physical infrastructure.

“Throughout our 25 years, we have focused on building long-term partnerships with our clients to become their trusted IT advisor and an extension of their team. We support enterprises by understanding their business, providing reliable and secure IT strategies, simplifying their IT operations and enabling adoption of leading-edge technology,” Whittaker said.

FNTS is a trusted IT services and multi-cloud management provider that operates one of the most secure, technically advanced data centers in the United States.

In 1995, with less than 15 employees, it began as a startup company called First National Technology Solutions, a wholly owned subsidiary of First National of Nebraska, which also is parent company to First National Bank of Omaha. In its early years, FNTS provided managed services, support, consulting and project management to organizations. The projects involved implementations of networks and systems, along with upgrades and conversions. FNTS also provided support services to ensure client data protection.

As many organizations started fully embracing technology and computer systems within the workforce, FNTS helped them convert Novell networks to Windows networks and establish Exchange email systems. Once its data center was completed, FNTS started expanding its technical skill sets and offerings.

In 2000, FNTS began providing hosting and co-location services, allowing clients the ability to take advantage of the redundancy and security of its data center. FNTS also expanded its breadth of technical skills to include mainframe, AIX and iSeries. Today, FNTS continues to provide support for legacy technology, including mainframe, iSeries, pSeries and AIX. FNTS’ ability to support and manage a full array of technology continues to be a substantial differentiator in the marketplace.

As virtualization technology started to gain traction in 2006-2007, FNTS developed its Server-by-the-Slice offering, allowing clients to pay for server capacity on a usage-based model instead of having to own and operate their own physical hardware. Throughout this timeframe, FNTS continued to expand its managed and professional services practices by advising, building, migrating and managing its clients’ infrastructure. These offerings caused a dramatic shift from traditional co-location clients to cloud migration clients. 

Cloud technology enables clients to operate with agility and speed. As early adopters of cloud technology found, many workloads moved easily to the cloud. The amount of time needed to deploy servers is minutes instead of days or weeks. Cloud technology also provides portability and mobility of servers to offer more flexibility. Over the past five years, FNTS has expanded its service capabilities for public, private and hybrid cloud deployments. FNTS also developed cloud management capabilities to assist clients with managing multi-cloud environments with Navigator, a portal that provides a single pane of glass for customers to provision and manage servers that run at FNTS or through another public cloud provider. FNTS also enhanced its service offerings to include cost optimization and containment capabilities for the public cloud.

FNTS has established a strong partnership with Azure and has experienced more than 90% growth in its Azure public cloud consumption in 2019. FNTS employees also developed and enhanced several competencies by participating in Azure services training/certification. FNTS has built a strong partner network over the years, working alongside the world’s most respected technology companies, which include Microsoft, IBM, VMware, Dell EMC and Palo Alto Networks.

Like many technology domains, the cloud space is evolving rapidly and in a range of interesting directions. FNTS is committed to investing in delivery models and operating approaches that combine the advantages of cloud technology with careful and flexible cost monitoring and the capability to slot workloads and technologies for a wider range of real-world customer use cases; such as those in the health care and financial services sectors.

The cloud also has reduced disaster recovery costs by making security solutions very affordable with several different options for redundancy inherent to the cloud itself. More development is currently occurring with machine learning and artificial intelligence, providing more analytics with built-in tools and capabilities. In addition, as regulatory compliance continues to evolve and advance, FNTS is investing in next generation security capabilities to assist clients with improving security posture and expanding security capabilities.

FNTS believes the simplification of multi-platform, multi-cloud operations with value-added services to streamline the cloud migration journey and optimize cost are a likely destination for the future.