SDN is in the final planning stages for a new building location that would serve as a disaster recovery center. The building will help ensure that service to SDN’s customers continues, uninterrupted, even in the event of a major emergency. In addition, the $10 million technology center will have rental space for data center storage and co-location available to other companies.
Read more about the project in this Argus Leader story.
Julie Hoyer
Marketing Specialist
Telecom research shows some statistics that may surprise you.
CHART 1.) The United States comes in fifth place when measured by “percentage of population with broadband access.” Surprised? (Germany, Canada, France and the UK led the way.) And when the U.S. goes up against the world in “broadband subscribers per 100 inhabitants,” it ranks No. 22. (We were below countries like Korea, Canada, France and the UK.)
What are we doing to make headway? The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act’s Broadband Technology Opportunity Program (BTOP) and Broadband Initiatives Program) (BIP) should be helping to stimulate growth in the United States. Even President Obama has directed the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (the folks behind the broadband stimulus) to help the FCC with a plan to make 500 MHz of spectrum available by the fourth quarter of 2010.
Does SDN Communications have a role in this nationwide effort? SDN was chosen receive a $20 million BTOP broadband stimulus grant to connect rural hospitals, schools, libraries and public safety agencies in South Dakota with 359 miles of fiber. That means 305 new anchor institutions in our state will have SDN’s 10 Megabit per second services. Hopefully the nation will follow South Dakota’s lead for fiber-optic power.
Source: Information Week, July 12, 2010
CHART 2.) Does it surprise you that Cisco topped the charts for both of these best-selling vendor lists? Cisco also came in first for network security hardware. Out of the 19 category charts listed in CRN Magazine, eight of them were led by Cisco or HP. HP was the No. 1 company in color displays, laser printers, desktops and notebooks. As CRN states, “It’s HP and Cisco’s world; we just live in it.”
Source: CRN Magazine, March 2010
Renee Halgerson
Marketing Specialist
SDN Communications
SDN Communications’ Network Surveillance Center (NSC) fields calls 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. The NSC monitors circuits, equipment, switches and routers. They are the front-lines for incoming customer calls.
Cassie Baldwin, NSC Supervisor, explains how good customer service is a high priority for our customers 24×7x365:
Communication Service for the Deaf (CSD) has been awarded a $14.9 million contract to use towards a marketing initiative called Project Endeavor. The project’s goal is aimed at improving access to technology such as broadband and videophones to populations of deaf and hard of hearing.
CSD hopes to get the project up and running in the next three months and will be partnering with SDN Communications, among other agencies, to make it happen.
Click here to read the full article in the Argus Leader.
Renee Halgerson
Marketing Specialist
SDN Communications
You’re interested in Unified Communications (UC), but you’re not sure exactly what else it can bring to your office besides dial tone and voice mail.
Consider this. If you integrate your phone system into the applications you use every day, like a customer relationship management tool (CRM) (like Sugar CRM, SalesForce.com, etc.) it can make a profitable difference. A simple “click-to-dial” or a “screen pop” increases productivity and makes the software and your day-to-day business run more smoothly.
Another feature to try is mobile phone integration. Single Number Reach (also known as Simultaneous Ring or Sim Ring) is a feature that allows one phone number to ring your desk phone and your mobile phone at the same time. It also allows you to switch an active call between the phones. UC can replace chat tools like AIM and Messenger with enterprise versions and can deploy high-end desktop videoconferencing. Besides improving employee collaboration and efficiency, UC also creates a more mobile workforce for your office (saving you travel expenses).
In the end, you get to pick and choose which pieces of UC to implement. If you’d like a demonstration of these features or a list of more benefits, visit our website or contact SDN.
Renee Halgerson
Marketing Specialist
SDN Communications
In June, I attended the South Dakota/North Dakota Banker Association Annual Convention in Fargo as part of SDN Technologies. The banking industry is going through a lot of changes; many of which have an effect on community banks in North and South Dakota. The regulatory environment within the banking industry has encountered significant change. SOX/PCI compliance along with new offerings like Remote Deposit require community banks to embrace new levels of sophistication that would have been unexpected even 3 or 4 years ago.
Despite these new challenges and lingering effects of the economy, community banks continue to move forward on core, strategic IT initiatives like IP Telephony and storage. Attendees were also interested in technologies that can either help generate incremental revenue, like MPLS (multi-protocol label switching) broadband, or lessen risks, like advanced network security appliances.
If you’d like to find out more about what technologies SDN can offer your bank, call me at 605-978-1038.
Eric Sahly
Senior Account Executive
SDN Technologies
My name is Zach Edman and I am an Intern at SDN this summer. I will be starting my first year in the Business Management Graduate Program at the University of South Dakota in the fall. During my time with the Marketing Department I have been asked to write several blogs for the website about my experiences here at SDN as well as how I have used some of SDN’s services throughout my time at USD.
Having lived on my own the past two years at the University of South Dakota it is easy to look back and think of everything that is not fun about living in the dorms at USD; little to no privacy, bad dorm food (although, that is only according to my friends, I found the food to be quite tasty), uncomfortable beds, etc. I could go on for pages about the things I didn’t like about living in the dorms. But the one thing that I can look back on and appreciate was the speed of our internet in the dorms. As I said earlier, I have rented my own place to live the past two years, which means I had to find my own internet service provider and pay for it. After having to deal with slow internet speeds, repeated calls to my internet service provider and numerous attempts to increase our speed, I decided that living in the dorms wasn’t as bad as I had thought for one simple reason: I could always count on being able to connect to the internet and have a fast connection.
I like to play video games online (when I am not devoting my time to my studies at the library) and the connection in the dorms was so much faster than the connection I have had the last two years it’s amazing considering the number of people who could be on the network in the dorms at any given time. When I lived in dorms as a freshman and sophomore there was no wireless internet in the dorms and there were only two Ethernet jacks to plug into in each room, so if you had an Xbox you wanted to connect to the internet you had to unplug either yours or your roommate’s computer. But now that all of the dorms have wireless I can’t help but be jealous of the incoming freshman and sophomores. Well, except when the school doesn’t turn the air conditioning on until May, but that’s another story.
Zach Edman
Intern
SDN Communications
For the past year, SDN has been telling the story of our “One Common Thread.” We’ve focused on how SDN’s innovative technology affects everyday life. In SDN’s latest commercial, Michele Benson and Dr. Dan Heinemann discuss Sanford’s latest tool - My Sanford Chart - which allows patients to communicate with health care providers online. With the help of SDN’s fiber-optic network, doctors in all areas can send and receive information at the speed of light.
Click below to watch our new commerical:
(Mobile users: click here to watch it through YouTube.)
Ashton Dockendorf
Marketing Specialist
SDN Communications
As previous blog posts have discussed, SDN is growing. As part of that growth plan, SDN is laying the ground work for a $10 million building project at the northeast corner of 60th Street North and La Mesa Drive.
The new building would serve as a second operating location for protecting SDN’s network as well as a high-tech office space where other businesses could co-locate network equipment.
Click here to read the full article in the Sioux Falls Business Journal.
Michael Kedik, Vice President of Information Technology, Application and Product Development at SDN, along with nine other individuals from around the state received the bronze Leadership Award from the worldwide Junior Achievement office in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Junior Achievement is a worldwide organization that focuses on teaching elementary, middle school and high school students about workforce readiness, running your own business as well as managing their money through many different hands on projects.
SDN is proud to employ individuals who support the community and pass on their knowledge and skills to tomorrow’s business leaders.
Zach Edman
Intern
SDN Communications
