CGI Standardizes On NetApp In Major US Data Center Overhaul

CGI is expanding its services partnership with NetApp for joint enterprise data and storage customers including NetApp Keystone for subscription-based block storage.

Global IT professional services firm CGI this week said it has replaced its U.S.-based multi-vendor data center storage infrastructure with NetApp technology, and that NetApp’s Keystone Storage-as-a-Service offering will power its block storage capabilities.

Montreal, Quebec-based CGI is a 50-year-old consulting company with over 100,000 consultants in over 40 countries worldwide. It works with clients in the public sector as well as in a variety of private industries including manufacturing, utilities, retail and more, said Virginia Williams, senior vice president and business unit leader for U.S. Northwest operations at CGI.

“We have some specialized products or IP that we’ve developed over the years with clients that we have good success with, but we’re sort of product-agnostic,” Williams told CRN. “We keep the client at the center of everything we do, and we’re there to drive outcomes through consulting and technology.”

Under the new agreement, CGI, ranked No. 18 on CRN’s 2026 Solution Provider 500, and NetApp will cooperate on designing, delivering and operating a best-of-breed storage solution, with CGI delivering services on behalf of NetApp, Williams said. The two will also partner to deliver enterprise data and storage services with flexible consumption models to joint customers, she said.

“NetApp is a leader in their industry, and our partnership is very modern,” she said. “It is also a model of what is going to go on in our industry, which is this idea of we’re not ‘client’ and ‘vendor’ anymore. We’re really co-investors. And that’s really where we're headed with our global relationship with NetApp. NetApp is our customer, and we are their customer, and it is a global alliance partner at CGI.”

Christian Alfsen, vice president of consulting services for CGI Northwest, told CRN the company has been providing professional services on NetApp’s behalf since 2020, as well as working with NetApp via CGI’s offshore delivery centers in India for things like data migration and upgrades.

Most recently, CGI has also been providing managed services via NetApp’s Keystone Storage-as-a-Service offering for the last two and a half years for NetApp’s global clients.

CGI selected NetApp to be its data center storage and technology provider based on the quality and the direction the vendor is taking its products, Williams said.

“We are doing a replacement of our storage solutions, and we are standardizing on NetApp,” she said. “We’re going to start with the U.S. That’s a fairly large data center for us, with a lot of clients. And that’s just phase one of this. This data center is where we run client operations. … We’re in the process of standing up NetApp equipment and very shortly will be migrating clients.”

Williams declined to say which vendors’ equipment NetApp will displace but said there are multiple vendors involved.

Alfsen said that about 10 petabytes of storage capacity are being replaced with NetApp equipment.

That amount of storage is being replaced despite the current shortage of components including memory, hard drives and SSDs, Alfsen said.

“I think we got lucky because we actually started this deal late last year, so we got a head start before NetApp and the rest of the industry started to run into some of those delays,” he said. “The hardware is actually in our data centers now, and it’s being configured, and we’ve already started migrating some of the data. … The old hardware gets retired.”

Alfsen said CGI has 58 external clients and 23 internal clients impacted by the migration to the new NetApp storage technology.

With the migration, CGI now has a more modern technology base for providing services to external and internal clients that provides improved security and threat detection while taking advantage of NetApp’s Keystone subscription-based technology, Alfsen said.

“For us, there is a financial benefit as well,” he said. “Otherwise, we wouldn’t be doing this, of course. But we didn’t look at just price. We looked at the technology itself and modernizing our technology.”