Transcript
Pipeline based out of Houston, Texas. Planes All-American is a midstream energy company. We operate across North America, about 18,000 miles of pipeline, over 50 crude terminals, over 150 million barrels of crude storage. Being a critical infrastructure company presents a few unique challenges in that we are often targeted by specific groups of threat actors. We have sites across North America in very remote locations where we can't always get good access to strong technical resources, so that's why the right technology is really important to put out there. We need reliability and we need simplicity. Before we started looking at the market, we were stitching together a handful of different sort of best-of-breed type technologies, which created a bunch of additional administrative overhead for my team. One of the biggest draws to Fortinet for us was just how simple that platform is and how uniquely integrated it is across the different SKUs within the product. And also the cost was very attractive. When we looked at the comparative product stack, Fortinet generally was coming in between 50 and 70 percent cheaper for a lot of the components that we selected. So over the last about 12 months, we've replaced all of our corporate firewalls with Fortinet. Coupled with our Fortinet investment, we are using the Enterprise Security Bundle and the OT signatures as well. We've also used quite a bit of the professional services from Fortinet, which really helped us move quickly. We took about six weeks to replace all of our corporate firewalls, which is unprecedentedly quick for how our typical project lifecycle works. We've recently started switching out our legacy SD-WAN investments with Fortinet as well at all of our field sites, particularly within our terminals. Our longer-term vision for that is to be able to provide that high reliability in our network while keeping things secure. We have purchased the SASE product. We came from a competitor product where we never over three years were able to actually get value from that investment. It's not a cheap undertaking, however, there is a ton of value, especially as distributed and remote as a lot of our sites are. So with Fortinet leveraging professional services, our ability to execute on that and get that rolled out to our end users was very quick, and we saw the uptake within six, seven weeks. One of the great opportunities that we saw when we started working with Fortinet was the ability to reinvest some of the savings to add new capabilities for plans and to make us more secure overall, one of which was the NDR component, which was something that we historically were not doing. So this is a brand new capability helping to keep our staff and our assets safe. One of the things I think my team and I love most about the investment in Fortinet is the Forty manager and its ability to become that single pane of glass across network and security assets for us. So when Planes looks at AI, obviously we look at this from a business lens. There's a few kind of core drivers that we're really looking to accomplish. The first of which is really leveraging AI for automation and looking to kind of simplify a lot of our processes and our workflows. The second is about protecting value leakage. Lastly is really value chain optimization, understanding how to remove those bottlenecks and optimize our logistics, optimize how we run our contracts, optimize how we do group blending, all types of different business components there. Planes sees AI as a very strategic enabler for us across obviously our business and our commercial side, but also even within IT. We are really looking forward to some of the investments Fortinet's been making and we're very excited about some of the agents that are coming out. We have limited staff to work with and these new agents, these new experiences are coming out are helping us scale up without having to scale out in staffing. Right from the onset when I started working with the Fortinet account teams, we never felt pressured into making a decision. It was really more about finding the right opportunity for us to partner on and that has been true in all my interactions with them over the last year. The real value I think in this partnership is going to come into the investments that Fortinet's continuing to make in AI and continuing to invest in that platform consolidation and helping us do things consistently across our OT environments, across our IT environments, and helping us to leverage those investments in AI to do so in a very cost-effective and scalable way.
