FIS is a Fortune 500, S&P 500 company that provides technical services to financial institutions around the world. The U.S.-based company serves more than 20,000 clients in over 130 countries and employs 53,000 people globally. FIS powers the financial world with software, services, consulting and outsourcing, with solutions focused on retail and institutional banking, payments, asset and wealth management, risk and compliance, trade enablement, transaction processing and record-keeping. Its technology powers billions of transactions annually, and it has been a MetTel customer since 2010.

Always thinking about what's next for its customers, FIS was executing a digital transformation plan to ensure those customers would stay cutting-edge within the financial industry. The key to the plan was a voice and networking infrastructure that could scale to meet future demands.

FIS required a network that could accommodate expected increases in application and performance bandwidth demands. It also needed a network that could respond to congestion or latency and prioritize some connections over others. The traditional voice and data networks serving its banking clients, built on MPLS across the U.S., were unable to scale to meet increasing bandwidth needs, and FIS lacked network visibility at the enterprise level.

Meeting those requirements called for network visibility, intelligence and flexibility that traditional networks simply could not provide.

When controlled by software rather than hardware, networks gain efficiency and flexibility, so FIS decided SD-WAN could offer its clients the resilience and bandwidth they would need, along with a central console giving network administrators better control and an easier path to scaling future projects.

FIS spent nine months evaluating SD-WAN solutions and found MetTel's Managed SD-WAN service to be the market's most mature. FIS and MetTel worked and trained together to upgrade client MPLS networks across the U.S., reducing performance degradation and giving FIS visibility into network traffic. The MetTel platform combined MPLS, broadband internet circuits and 4G-LTE into one SD-WAN-controlled network for optimal application performance, including real-time voice and video. Because SD-WAN can use any circuit with any carrier and any technology, FIS has seen significant cost savings by driving down the price per megabit of WAN circuits.

The MetTel Managed SD-WAN platform also offers Intelligent Process Automation (IPA). AI-driven automation identifies, reports and addresses network incidents and events; when an issue occurs, the AI engine either notifies technicians and recommends remedial steps or performs the action on its own. As a result, 83% of SD-WAN incidents are automatically identified, 100% are triaged and 34% are automatically restored, and the system learns from experience and keeps improving.

FIS engineers took part in MetTel's SD-WAN management training program, so they were ready to troubleshoot through the portal when needed. That has helped reduce mean time to repair (MTTR), since fewer escalations to senior engineers are now required.

• Traffic optimized via a smart, flexible network with real-time QoS and dynamic path selection
• Increased bandwidth support and significant savings by driving down the price per megabit of WAN circuits
• 83% of SD-WAN incidents automatically identified, 100% triaged and 34% automatically restored
• A single point of control lets FIS roll out network-wide updates
• Fewer escalations to senior engineers and reduced MTTR after MetTel SD-WAN training
• Enhanced voice and data performance with quicker issue resolution for happier end users