About

Meet the team behind WISdom

We’re database experts, engineers, and innovators united by a mission to simplify, optimize, and accelerate the value of technology.

Our mission

Build software to help organizations and their people achieve their most ambitious goals.

Our vision

To simplify, optimize, and accelerate the value of technology.

Our values

Our core values drive everything we do

Give Back

We believe in contributing to our community and helping others succeed. We measure our success by your savings and achievements.

Efficiency

We optimize everything we do to deliver maximum value with minimal waste. Every database cycle, every support ticket, every meeting should deliver maximum impact.

Ownership

We take full responsibility for our customers' success. We own the outcome, not just the output. Your success is our responsibility.

Curiosity

We never stop learning and exploring new ways to solve problems. We ask “what if?” and “why not?” constantly to find better solutions.

Leadership

Leadership team

Ben DeBow

Founder and CEO

Ben DeBow founded Fortified on a simple conviction: technology decisions are financial decisions, and enterprises should scale with efficiency, not excess. Across more than 20 years inside some of the most demanding database environments in the industry, he saw the same blind spot everywhere, leaders who could measure performance in milliseconds but never the dollars behind it.

Author of End of Abundance in Tech, Ben introduced the idea of Total Cost of Code and pioneered FinOps for Data, a discipline for seeing technology through a financial lens instead of a purely technical one. It reframes the question from “is it fast?” to “what is this worth, and what does it actually cost?” Because the real cost is never just the build. You build it once and pay for it once, then let it run for years, and a system that lives for 20 years spends far more in operation than it ever cost to create. That thinking is now built into WISdom, the platform Fortified created to put the value and the cost of the data estate on the same screen.

Articles by Ben

Douglas McDowell

COO

Douglas McDowell serves as Chief Operating Officer of Fortified, bringing a career spent at the center of the data and software industry. As Chief Strategy Officer at SQL Sentry, and through its acquisition by SolarWinds, he helped shape one of the most widely used database monitoring platforms in the market, giving him a rare, firsthand view of how these businesses are built, scaled, and sold.

Douglas is widely recognized for his command of go-to-market strategy, portfolio rationalization, and the move from perpetual licensing to subscription. He has led software-to-SaaS transformations from the inside, and his expertise runs deep across observability, data management, databases, AI, and the broader DevOps and DataOps toolchain and services market. It is exactly that mix of operator, builder, and category strategist that Fortified draws on to turn database performance and cost into a business story leaders can act on.

Articles by Douglas

Misha Capewell

Director of Marketing

Misha Capewell leads marketing at Fortified, directing strategy and execution across brand, demand generation, events, and digital. He owns how Fortified presents itself to the enterprise market, from category positioning to the integrated programs that bring WISdom to the data and technology leaders evaluating it. His mandate sits where technical substance meets commercial outcome.

Misha pairs genuine technical depth with disciplined marketing craft. He understands enterprise data environments and the priorities of the executives who govern them, and he translates complex capability into clear, credible value. The result is marketing that speaks to how enterprises actually buy, connecting what WISdom delivers to the outcomes that drive the decision: performance, cost, and control.

Articles by Misha

Missy Kelly

Director of Operations

Missy Kelly directs operations at Fortified, overseeing finance, human resources, and sales operations so the business runs with precision as it scales. She manages the financial engine from invoicing through payroll and benefits, and leads the full employee lifecycle, from onboarding and enablement to performance management.

Her value is operational rigor at enterprise standard. Missy aligns day-to-day execution with company strategy, building the dependable financial and organizational foundation that growth depends on. She ensures systems, people, and finances operate as one, a discipline that underpins Fortified’s ability to deliver consistently for its customers.

Adi Cohen

Master of Data

Adi Cohen is a Solution Architect and the Master of Data at Fortified, helping define the company’s technical direction and deliver the solutions customers depend on. With deep experience designing and building large-scale data environment management systems, Adi brings the architectural range that shapes how Fortified engineers for scale, reliability, and performance.

Adi pairs hands-on engineering depth with formal credentials, including the Microsoft Certified Master: Azure Data Engineer Associate certification and additional Microsoft qualifications. The result is a builder who understands both the theory and the reality of enterprise data at scale, and who turns that expertise into the platform capabilities that make WISdom dependable for the estates it monitors.

Our journey

From a database blind spot to a new discipline

2020
The Foundation
Fortified is founded with a vision to solve database operations challenges, and WISdom is created to give leaders the measures that technical-only tools never showed.
2023
The Breakthrough
WISdom launched, the first platform to connect database performance to real cost and business value. FinOps for Data was born.
2024
The Momentum
The platform and customer base expand, proof that seeing cost alongside value drives measurable results across the enterprise.
2025
The Validation
The FinOps Foundation created a new category for Fortified and recognized WISdom on its platform, independent proof of the discipline we pioneered: the cost and value of data.
2026
The Reckoning
The AI spend wave hits the books. Enterprises invest heavily in AI and data, and the bill arrives. The era of free technology is over, and Fortified leads the accountability era.

See our FinOps Foundation listing

2030

Our 5-year vision

Global Leader

The definitive company in FinOps for Data, trusted across the enterprise worldwide.

The Standard

The benchmark every organization measures the cost and value of its data against.

Force Multiplier

Turning data teams into stewards of financial performance, not just uptime.

Enduring Trust

The partner enterprises keep as their data estates grow, because the value compounds every year.

Join us as we transform how the world thinks about the cost and value of technology

Starting with data.

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