Fortis

Overview

About

Fortis is a managed IT provider headquartered at 4952 Windplay Dr in El Dorado Hills, California, with additional offices in Roseville and Walnut Creek, serving small and midsize businesses across the Greater Sacramento Area. The company was founded in 2009 by Peter Oliver, its founder and chief technology officer, whose background is unusual in the MSP world: before Fortis, Oliver was CEO and founder of Ai Metrix, and he invented the NeuralStar network management system that managed the United States Department of Defense's Global Information Grid across more than 850 military sites. The current chief executive is David Ciapponi, with David Little as vice president of sales and marketing and Enrique Pasos as director of technology and operations. The company's tagline, "Say Goodbye to IT Headaches," and its positioning as "a complete IT department at your disposal" describe the model: one vendor acting as the client's entire technology staff. In 2016 the company merged with CNS, a local IT firm, an event visible in the team's history through senior IT engineer David Potts, who joined Fortis in the merger after 14 years at CNS. A quoted client, Marc Alciati, chief executive of IntelleTrace, speaks to the firm's work on its site. Fortis delivers its services through a team-based model rather than a generalist queue. The Desktop and Devices team handles end-user support, the Network and Security team manages routers, switches, backups, and connectivity, the Server Team covers backups, shared applications, and availability, and a dedicated telephone and VoIP group manages business voice, including ProLinePBX, the company's own hosted VoIP phone system. Around those teams sit managed IT services, managed cybersecurity, private cloud hosting, backup and disaster recovery, cloud services spanning Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace, compliance services, IT consulting, and user and network support. The operating values are stated as five short commitments: be reachable, be reliable, be enjoyable, be capable, and be proactive. Office hours are Monday through Friday, 8am to 5pm Pacific, and the company can be reached at (916) 235-4200. The five stated values, be reachable, be reliable, be enjoyable, be capable, and be proactive, read like a service-level agreement written as culture. They describe how the team-based model is supposed to feel to a client: someone picks up, the fix works, the interaction is pleasant, the engineers know their craft, and problems get caught early. Google appears on the partner list, reflecting the Google Workspace side of the cloud practice. With office hours Monday through Friday, 8am to 5pm Pacific, the firm keeps a traditional business-hours front door over a team-based delivery model.