Why Fortified
The economics of technology are broken. We’re fixing them, starting with data.
Ben DeBow, CEO and Founder, Fortified
We founded Fortified on a simple shift: the era of throwing infinite resources at technology is over. Systems got built for functionality first, with cost and value accounted for late, so environments grew more expensive every year, weighed down by technical debt no one could measure in dollars. AI made building easy. It didn’t make accounting easy.
The blind spot is that no one sees cost where it actually lives: the application, the workload, the individual query. Everything has a cost, from code to data. Without that granularity you can’t tie spend to value, and if you can’t tie it to value, you can’t control it. We built WISdom to close that gap, making the cost and value of every workload visible, and accountability the standard.
Our journey
The journey that led us here
Every solution starts with a painful problem. Here’s how we found the gap between database operations and financial reality.
Accountability without authority
Teams were accountable for uptime on systems they didn’t design and couldn’t price. Built fast, accounted for late: brilliant engineers reduced to human dashboards, waiting for the next crisis.
The bill came due
Cloud and infrastructure bills climbed every month with no context on what drove them. Finance could see the number, not the cause, because no one saw cost where it lives: the workload, the query.
Investment without insight
Leadership approved major spend with no line of sight to return. Teams could see the ten slowest queries, but not which ones cost the most, or returned the least. Spend, disconnected from value.
The root cause
The problem wasn’t just visibility, it was language. Database teams spoke in milliseconds and wait stats. Finance spoke in dollars. Nobody translated one into the other. So we built the layer that does: turning query plans into ROI, and turning cost-where-it-lives into a number the business can act on.
From the community
The names DBAs actually listen to
Ben DeBow, great to see you. Your conversations on #finops are game changing.
If storing and processing data is high cost for you, connect with Ben.
You explain the cost side of tech in a way that hits every DBA and Dev straight in the budget.
The platform
Where SQL Server performance meets dollars
The platform that defines FinOps for Data, speaking database performance and financial impact in one language. Other tools show you what happened. WISdom shows you what it cost, and exactly how to make it cheaper.
SQL Server cost optimization, down to the query
The dollar cost of every query, stored proc and workload. Cost of Compute, Cost of Data, Cost of Queries, all mapped to the Financial Cost of Technology.
See cost optimization →Capacity planningSQL Server capacity planning without the guesswork
See the pressure before it becomes a purchase order. Right-size with evidence, and quantify the savings down to the dollar.
See capacity planning →Performance monitoringSQL Server performance monitoring, without the alert noise
Real-time monitoring built ground-up for SQL Server (wait stats, blocking, deadlocks), turned into dollars and ROI, not another dashboard.
See performance monitoring →Customers
Trusted by teams who demand results
Don’t just take our word for it. Here’s what database and finance teams say about WISdom.
WISdom proved an issue we were having internally, and then solved that issue. This solution isn’t something we just use, it’s something that allows us to highlight our problems and solve them quickly.
WISdom gives me a lot of information I can’t get from other sources. The opportunities page, the health scores, the ability to act on slow queries: it’s all right there. And unlike some legacy tools, it’s not cumbersome to navigate.
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