Double Tree, Bloomington

Booth 51

Crowne Plaza, St Paul

Booth 39

“With the increase in mobile devices and cyber crime in general, there is an ever increasing interest in securing data,” said Dave Shepherdson, Phenomenal’s COO. “We welcome Mark to our team as a key contributor. His real world experience brings a major strength in our ability to auditi and design effective solutions for our clients.” 

For more information call 952-818-3300 or check the Phenomenal Networks web site www.phenomenalnetworks.com.

Cisco Certified Network Associate Wireless (CCNA® Wireless) validates associate-level knowledge and skills to configure, implement and support of wireless LANs, specifically those networks using Cisco equipment. With a CCNA Wireless certification, network professionals can support a basic wireless network on a Cisco WLAN in a SMB to enterprise network. 

“We at Phenomenal have seen an increasing interest in wireless with almost every one of our projects including some level of wireless technology,” said Colleen Shepherdson, Phenomenal’s President and owner. “We congratulate Eddie on his certification and his almost perfect score in the test – a 99% pass mark. This certification recognizes our ongoing strategy to employ and continuously train staff that can apply effective answers to business problems using the latest technology.”

 For more information call 952-818-3300 or check the Phenomenal Networks web site www.phenomenalnetworks.com.

Holiday Inn, Duluth

Growth is a wonderful thing but comes with it’s own challenges. After going to digital processing in 2000, the company  first expanded into an 11,000 sq. ft. facility in 2004 and in July, 2007 is in another new facility of over 47,000 sq. ft.Employee count has almost doubled in the last two years. The business is also cyclical, peaking in the main wedding and holiday periods. This means that the workforce varies causing other challenges. 

When they were planning the latest facility, Mike, Chris and the management team looked at both the expansion of operating technology and the IT infrastructure to support the business growth. Their existing network was primarily based on Cisco equipment but the communications was through an Avaya system. “ The Avaya was working well but it was just a phone system, commented Chris Hanline. “We needed redundancy and the ability to expand and do a lot more with the system.” “Our Cisco representative invited us to see their IP Communications demonstration and frankly we were immediately sold on the whole concept of using a complete Cisco system to provide us with both the functionality and the growth path for the future.” Chris and Mike agreed.

 With the company’s widely distributed research, production, and sales network, Thys Coetzee, director of IT for Zinpro, wanted to put in place a global, IP-based network so that all company communication, whether data, voice or video, would be straightforward to use and transparent throughout the entire organization. “My overall goal was to enable employees located anywhere, whether they are at a manufacturing plant in Iowa or a sales office in Japan, to communicate with each other and back to headquarters, whether they are at a desk or on the road,” says Coetzee. “We needed support from a good vendor to help implement this. Finally with Phenomenal Networks we had the right strength to define and use the right Cisco technology.” 

The Phenomenal Networks team, headed by company COO Dave Shepherdson, worked with Coetzee to map out an implementation plan that supported the company’s long-term IT strategy, with phases that could be brought online as the company grew. The plan had to support the global expansion of technology services, including the development of a disaster recovery/business continuity (DR/BC) site.

Both Coetzee and Shepherdson point out that this level of business continuity and disaster recovery is rare in the SMB world. “Although we are a small business with just 150 employees, we are operating 24 hours a day internationally,” says Coetzee. “In order to compete, we need to invest in this kind of technology. Cisco really backed our project and got the price to an ROI [return on investment] level that was reasonable for us.” Coetzee also notes that the additional investment in a Cisco solution paid off when they hit a problem with a carrier when cutting over the voice solution.

“We spent at least 24 hours on the phone with Cisco TAC [Technical Assistance Center], and our call was transparently routed among offices around the world to get it resolved quickly,” he says. “The Phenomenal team has sat right with me, even through the night, to work through issues. It is when things go wrong that you really know what kind of backup and support you have from your partner and vendor. Phenomenal Networks and Cisco deliver it.”

The Challenges and Goals

The Nation’s healthcare industry is in a state of continuous change with many new legislations and new advanced technologies being introduced. All of this is adding to the complexity of managing a healthcare facility  while keeping costs at a manageable  level and still maintaining reasonable standards of excellence. Windom Area Hospital has  enjoyed strong growth over the past years which has added to these challenges. The current wave of change relates to the legislation to introduce Electronic Health Record systems on a National basis. To help enable this, the Federal Government has established financial incentives through the HITECH Act. These incentives also come with governing rules the most pervasive of these being termed “Meaningful Use”. This was one of the driving forces to bring Windom to review their communication network system.

“ It is key for us to meet the  Meaningful Use standards including the interoperability requirements of Stage 3 so that we qualify for the incentives” said Lori Ling, IT coordinator for Windom and manager of the Phenomenal upgrade project. “Of course that also includes other challenges such as continuing to meet the HIPAA security rules.”  Windom was experiencing quality and down time issues with their existing hosted voice service. They also needed to update their wireless system functionality and make their network system more reliable—all with a goal of ensuring a consistent and effective upgrade path to enable easier future growth. One of the ongoing goals is to create a Paperless and Filmless environment. A major solution to this was to electronically transfer films via a PACS system. The new network system needed to accommodate and secure the connections to the four services from Mayo, Siemens, GE and Virtual that were already in place.  All of this had to be accomplished with a limited budget and without any major disturbance.

 The Challenges and Goals

Every part of the nation’s healthcare industry is faced with many ongoing challenges including new legislations, advancing technologies as well as increasing customer/patient expectations (all of this while keeping costs at a manageable level and maintaining stated standards of excellence). So the type of growth that Douglas County Hospital has achieved over the last thirty years is a wonderful thing but comes with it’s own challenges. One of those was keeping the IT and communication structure up to date and meeting the growing needs of staff and patients and still planning for business growth.

“One of the more recent driving requirements came from our nursing staff”, said Dave Pedersen, IT Director DCH. “They said they needed to have all rooms and facilities connected wirelessly to enable them to maintain efficiency and the meet our excellence goals.” The challenge was to reconstruct the underlying networking system to enable new applications and functions to be built on that base system. An example was the existing Spectralink wireless phone system that was at end-of life.

Other requirements included how to accommodate a Siemens PBX phone system and also how to provide patients and visitors internet access without prejudicing the security of the overall system.

As always the budget was limited and any changes had to be accomplished without disrupting the 24×7 services to patients.