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TBL in Virginia Fantastic 50

TBL Networks a Virginia Chamber Fantastic 50 Company

 
Richmond, VA, April 27, 2012—The Virginia Chamber announced TBL Networks as the 12th fastest growing Virginia company at the 17th annual Virginia’s Fantastic 50 Awards Banquet on April 26 at the Westfields Marriott in Chantilly. TBL Networks was the only Richmond company to make the list, an achievement as Richmond was not represented at all the prior year.  Nearly 400 attendees at the ceremony saluted the winners for their entrepreneurial success and contribution to Virginia’s economy.  The evening’s keynote speaker, Lieutenant Governor Bill Bolling, gave an inspirational address recognizing the pivotal role of small businesses and entrepreneurs in growing Virginia’s economy.

To be eligible for the list of fifty businesses, a company must be privately held with headquarters in Virginia, show sales between $200,000 and $100 million, and demonstrate positive revenue growth and positive net income in its most recent fiscal year over the previous year.  Companies are judged on four-year sales revenue history.  The professional service firm Dixon Hughes Goodman verifies all award entries.

“Small businesses are the backbone of the Virginia economy, creating jobs and opportunity across the Commonwealth, said Virginia Chamber president and CEO Barry DuVal. “We are proud to recognize the achievements of our entrepreneurs at the Fantastic 50 banquet.”

TBL Networks is a major source of expertise for the technology sector in Central Virginia.  In 2010, TBL Networks was named Collaboration Partner of the Year for Cisco’s East Area as well as RichTech’s Emerging Company of the Year. Last year, TBL Networks was ranked 406 on the 2011 Inc. 500 list.  Recently, TBL was named to CRN magazine’s Tech Elite 250 list for 2012. TBL Networks is the only technology integrator in Virginia with four Cisco Voice CCIEs, employs the area’s only VMware VCDX, and had two engineers recognized as 2012 VMware vExperts.

“On behalf of TBL Networks, I am honored to have accepted the award for the Virginia Chamber’s Fantastic 50,” said Dan Griles, Sales Manager at TBL Networks.  “This distinction reflects TBL’s commitment to offer the best information technology solutions to small and medium businesses, while delivering the highest level of customer service.”

About the Award
Virginia’s FANTASTIC 50 award program is a signature event of the Virginia Chamber of Commerce.  The FANTASTIC 50 awards recognize leading businesses across the Commonwealth in all types of industries, and are the only statewide awards of this type in Virginia.  Nominations for the 2012 FANTASTIC 50 were sought last fall from local chambers of commerce, economic development organizations, and through the sponsors’ networks; companies may also nominate themselves. 

About TBL Networks, Inc.
TBL Networks is about moving forward with innovative technology.  With over 60 years of combined technical expertise, we empower clients’ collaboration, virtualization and data centers to do more with less. TBL delivers these advanced solutions directly where it counts the most – the desktop.  Building secure and reliable solutions that introduce efficiencies in human interaction is how we see the future.  Let us take you there at http://www.theblinkylight.com.

Embracing Technology to Support Collaboration

Collaboration is critical to an organization’s success. It helps drive innovation, improve customer service and support a communicative corporate culture. How you embrace technology will help define the impact of collaboration on your employees and your customer base.

To that point our partner Cisco offers an entire suite of collaboration tools that help improve engagement with all of your stakeholders. These include Collaboration Applications, Customer Collaboration, TelePresence and Unified Communications. Their products will help your team make decisions, solve problems, reduce costs and accelerate time to market. In addition, their solutions offer the flexibility to accommodate new developments as your needs evolve and help protect existing IT investments related to their technologies.

Collaboration Applications like WebEx can help add an online component to your capabilities. The application brings voice, video, and web conferencing capabilities individuals spread out at different locations. It can be used for real-time communication for meetings, sales, training, customer support and events. WebEx conferencing solutions will also help optimize the IT resources you already have in place as they are delivered through the SaaS model to support easy implementation and scaleability throughout your organization.

The Customer Collaboration suite of resources will establish or expand the foundation for an improved customer experience. We already touched on how SocialMiner offers support for customer interactivity in this recent blog post. But additional products like the Unified Contact Center and the Customer Voice Portal will help increase customer satisfaction and loyalty by offering sophisticated call routing, contact management and speech-enabled self-service capabilities. In addition, they can provide an alternative to the mostly reactive mode of traditional call centers while helping you build a platform that supports engagement and proactively with your customers.

Cisco’s multiple options for TelePresence add a component that brings attendees face to face even if they’re in different offices. This suite of products offers a new way to support collaboration through high-quality video conferencing. By embracing TelePresence to support collaboration your organization can reduce travel costs, speed up decision making and provide highly engaged service for customers and partners. The systems also offer interoperability based on the industry standards meaning less support will be required from your IT team to assist with connecting to customers, suppliers and partners who are running on different types of systems or networks.

Then you can add in their Unified Communications solutions to make sure that what we discussed above runs effectively over a single converged network. This suite of products helps extend collaboration by offering reliable communications support for delivering multiple applications like voice, video and presence services to various types of devices and IP endpoints. It also addresses the growing need to support mobility at an enterprise level. Implementing Cisco’s Unified Communications platform allows you to view, optimize, and manage the entire communications system from one screen.

Each of these tools will enable your team to work together more efficiently, build new channels to communicate with customers and improve the way your organization communicates. We’ll provide a more in-depth look at each of the solutions individually in future blog posts to provide a better understanding of the platforms Cisco offers to support collaboration.

Two at TBL Named vExperts 2012

 TBL Networks is very proud to announce that two of our Data Center Solutions Engineers, Sean Crookston and Harley Stagner, have been named as vExperts for the second year in a row by VMware. Sean and Harley received this designation as recognition of their contributions to the VMware, virtualization, and cloud computing communities.

According to VMware, “the vExperts are people who have gone above and beyond their day jobs in their contributions to the virtualization and VMware user community. vExperts are the bloggers, the book authors, the VMUG leaders, the tool builders and town criers, the tinkerers and speakers and thinkers who are moving us all forward as an IT industry.”

TBL Networks Solutions Engineer Sean Crookston also has the title of VMware Certified Advanced Professional in Data Center Administration (VCAP-DCA). Sean is only the 47thperson worldwide to achieve this elite virtualization certification.

TBL Networks Solutions Engineer Harley Stagner is the only VMware Certified Design Expert (VCDX) in Central Virginia, and just the 46th person worldwide to hold this title.  The VCDX is the highest certification available from VMware.

Congratulations again to Sean Crookston and Harley Stagner – vExperts again in 2012.

Cisco Adv. Data Center Partner

Richmond, VA (April 10th, 2012) – Cisco announced today that TBL Networks, Inc. has met the requirements and criteria necessary to earn the Cisco Advanced Data Center Architecture Specialization, the pinnacle data center partner certification available from Cisco.

Achieving the Cisco Data Center Architecture Specialization demonstrates a partner’s expert knowledge in selling, designing, installing, and supporting the Cisco Unified Data Center Architecture, a complete platform for delivering IT as a service within an organization. Cisco’s Unified Data Center includes products and solutions in three critical areas: Unified Management, Unified Fabric, and Unified Computing. Cisco avoids the complexity of a converged infrastructure through an innovative data center architecture designed specifically to support virtualization in the data center. Cisco Unified Data Center provides outstanding performance across physical and virtualized resources, cost efficiency through elimination of silos and simplification of deployment and operating tasks, fast deployment of a highly secure, proven infrastructure to support new business initiatives, and a broad range of storage, virtualization, application, and management alliance partners.

“TBL Networks is extremely proud to be recognized as a Cisco Advanced Data Center Architecture Specialized Partner,” said Alan Sears, President and CEO of TBL Networks, Inc. “This certification not only recognizes our success in delivering unmatched solutions through the most talented expertise in Central Virginia, but also recognizes our commitment to providing our clients with outstanding customer service.”

TBL Networks is home to Central Virginia’s only VMware Certified Design Expert (VCDX) and two EMC Technical Architects. In 2011, two TBL data center engineers were recognized as 2011 VMware vExperts.

About Cisco
Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) is the worldwide leader in networking that transforms how people connect, communicate and collaborate. Information about Cisco can be found at http://www.cisco.com.  For ongoing news, please go to http://newsroom.cisco.com.

About TBL Networks, Inc.
TBL Networks is about moving forward with innovative technology. With over 60 years of combined technical expertise, we empower clients’ collaboration, virtualization and data centers to do more with less. TBL delivers these advanced solutions directly where it counts the most – the desktop. Building secure and reliable solutions that introduce efficiencies in human interaction is how we see the future. Let us take you there at www.theblinkylight.com.

Build Your Own Private Cloud: TBL’s April Lunch and Learn

Join us for lunch to learn more about how you can build your next
generation data center with building blocks from industry leaders Cisco,
EMC and VMware with the VCE Vblock.  In our April Lunch & Learn series – “Build Your Own Private Cloud” – Cisco’s Sara Reed will lead the
discussion and allow you the chance to ask questions.

These events will be held on Wednesday, April 25th in Richmond, and also on Thursday, April 26th in Virginia Beach.  Please use this link to register for either event.
Topics:

  • UCS architectural overview
  • Stateless computing service profiles
  • Whole offer solutions Vblock – data center in a rack
  • Intelligent Automation for your Vblock environment

Who should attend:

Anyone interested in data center and how to transform your computing infrastructure.

Maximum of two attendees per organization.

Save your spot! Register now!

Agenda

11:30 AM – Registration

11:35 AM – Order Lunch

12:00 PM – Discussion with Sara

1:30 PM – Event Close

Learn, Communicate, Collaborate & Grow with Digital Video

Corporate use of video has become increasingly popular over the past few years.  Businesses are embracing it to promote their offerings to customers, train their workforce and increase visibility for their organization. If implemented effectively this platform provides an additional channel to connect with your stakeholders. If it isn’t rolled out strategically or by a strong business partner it just becomes an investment in technology that is underutilized.

Cisco has done a good job of addressing the need for enterprise video with their Digital Media Suite. The offering includes a comprehensive suite of webcasting and video sharing applications. Specific resources like Digital Signage, Cast and Show and Share can help transform how organizations learn, communicate, collaborate and grow.

Briefly, Digital Signage is a network-based application used to deliver information and training to digital signage. Cast delivers live video, on-demand video and broadcast TV channels over IP to digital displays. Show and Share is a webcasting and video sharing application for creating secure video communities to share ideas and expertise to a variety of devices.

Here are a few of the benefits the Digital Media Suite can deliver to your business:
-Improves communications by establishing a cost-effective and secure platform for creating, editing, uploading, searching and displaying digital media.
-Integrates with existing infrastructure and networking components.
-Provides training to geographically dispersed employees, customers, and partners while saving money on travel costs.
-Expands revenue opportunities by establishing new resources for product promotion and advertising.
-Facilitates collaboration allowing organizations to increase productivity, accelerate time to market, enable quicker decision making and promote sharing of expertise.

For technology managers the Digital Media Suite enables your team to create, manage and access content for a variety of applications from a single platform. The Digital Media Encoders (DMEs) capture the video from a variety of inputs and encode it into the popular digital formats for delivery across an IP network. Then the Digital Media Manager (DMM) allows your IT team to manage content and approval flows, create playlists and schedule video delivery. The content your users create can then be accessed by multiple devices using Show and Share or delivered to digital displays via Digital Signs.

Digital media offers a compelling platform for adding personalization and immediacy to your organization’s communications with stakeholders. Contact us to learn more about how these technologies can help you establish real-time and on-demand channels for sharing expertise, information, news and training.