Why I do what I do: I love working with start-up companies. It is very fulfilling to help entrepreneurs develop their strategies, avoid failure and to see them grow, sometimes beyond their expectations.

How I give back to the community: I volunteer for the Ankeny school system on its Technical Advisory Committee. I also spend time with the Technology Association of Iowa's HyperStream program to encourage middle school and high school students to consider technology as a career path..."

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Low costs

Council Bluffs, Ames and Des Moines rank among the 10 lowest-cost locations nationwide for data centers, based on a report from Boyd Co. Council Bluffs is sixth-lowest nationally, with an annual cost of $12 million; Ames is eighth, at $12.1 million; and Des Moines is ninth, at $12.4 million. Costs include labor, power, and property and sales taxes, among other expenses.

Green energy

Powering a data center - equipped with hundreds of heat-generating computers that also need to be cooled - is expensive. Doing it as cheaply as possible is important. Doing it with more green energy is important.

Iowa scores well on both fronts: Powering a data center costs about $500,000 a year in Des Moines and Council Bluffs compared with about $574,000 in Omaha and $2.1 million in New York City, the Boyd Co. reported.

MidAmerican Energy will generate about 20 percent of its power using renewable energy such as wind, more than any investor-owned utility in the country. That's key to companies like Google, which announced in late 2007 it would invest "hundreds of millions" in developing renewable energy sources that are cheaper than coal.

Tech bloggers speculate that Google plans to use 1,000 acres it owns near its Council Bluffs data center to build a wind farm. Google last week declined to say how it would use the land, but it denied any plans for a wind farm..."

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Click on the following link to see Google success story video:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VO8yNZs4XaM

Phillips has been with Qwest for the past 30 years and has a history of local community involvement, currently serving on a number of boards and committees. He is currently the chairman of the Iowa Business Council, which represents Iowa’s 22 largest businesses. Phillips also co-chairs the Iowa Institute for Tomorrow’s Workforce and has been appointed to a second term by Governor Culver to the Iowa Board of Education.

"South Dakota and Iowa share much more than just a contiguous border stretch. They share values and visions that make the heartland a great place to live, work and raise families," said Phillips. "I look forward to engaging with South Dakota business and political leaders on the myriad ways Qwest can help build even greater opportunities for the state and its residents to grow into a prosperous future."

In his local community, Phillips was elected to three terms as mayor of Bouton, Iowa, from 1981 to 1986, and served three terms as President of the Woodward-Granger Community Schools board of directors from 1995 to 2005.

As Qwest’s president in South Dakota, Phillips will work closely with the governor, state and federal legislators and their staffs, the South Dakota Public Utilities Commission and various other community leaders to implement corporate strategies throughout the state.

About Qwest

Customers coast to coast turn to Qwest's industry-leading national fiber-optic network and world-class Spirit of Service to meet their communications and entertainment needs. For residential customers, Qwest’s powerful combination of award-winning high-speed Internet, home and wireless voice solutions and digital TV includes a new generation of fiber-optic Internet services. Qwest is also the choice of 95 percent of Fortune 500 companies, offering a full suite of network, data and voice services for small businesses, large businesses and government agencies. Additionally, Qwest participates in Networx, the largest communications services contract in the world, and is recognized as a leader in the network services market by a leading technology industry analyst firm.

The marks that comprise the Qwest logo are registered trademarks of Qwest Communications International Inc. in the U.S. and certain other countries.

The purpose of the program - funded through the Iowa Department of Economic Development - is to prevent students from leaving the state after graduation. Officials hope exposing students to internships in the areas of advanced manufacturing, bioscience and information technology - industries identified as vital to the state's economic growth and strength - will help keep them in the state.

"There are a lot of cutting-edge technology positions here. Students don't have to go to Silicon Valley or Austin, Texas," said Mike Lang, CEO of Alliance Technologies and past chairman of the Technology Association of Iowa, which lobbied for the program.

"Reasons why students leave vary - because we don't have mountains and oceans - and there isn't a lot we can do about that," he said, but what the program can do is help students find internships.

Companies apply to the program for funding, and students apply directly to the companies for internships, said Alana Anderson, program director of the Iowa Student Internship Program.

"The idea behind the program isn't to hold students' hands, but to create opportunities for them," Anderson said..."

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...Beverly Gillis, president of Phasient, said the e-courses they are developing with ATW utilize audio recording and voice-playback for virtual role play. For example, human resources employees who are being trained can listen to a simulated customer complaint, audibly reply based on the training materials they just went through, and then get instant feedback on how they handled the situation..."

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And they know more must be done, with a greater sense of urgency.

"If we fall behind the rest of the world, which statistics [student performance on international tests] clearly show that we are, then we are going to be challenged to maintain the economic leadership that this country has enjoyed for a long time," said Clay Jones of Rockwell Collins.

Strengthening math, science, technology and engineering education has been a big focus of the state and national debate, but the panelists also talked about another set of interrelated skills where applicants fall short: the ability to communicate effectively, work in teams and provide leadership..."

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It's the firm's niche businesses that captures people's imagination, and sometimes prompts the question: "You do what?"

"You don't normally think of an accounting firm as being entrepreneurial, but these guys are," longtime Des Moines accountant Johnny Danos said.

Danos recently joined LWBJ as an independent consultant, after having spent the past decade heading the Greater Des Moines Community Foundation and, before that, running the Des Moines office of the national accounting firm KPMG.

LWBJ started in 1992 when the original partners - Tom Larson, Dave Watson, Jeff Bartling and Paul Juffer - left the national firm of Ernst & Young.

The four believed they could better serve middle-market clients if they escaped the bureaucracy of a large firm.

It has worked, Bartling said..."

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Waukee mayor Bill Peard believes Iowa's future is his town's future in the northeast part of Waukee at Hickman and Southeast Alice's Road. Cedar Falls-based Team Technologies wants to put up a $14 million data farm, a place where companies store much of the memory for their computer systems. Its location right next to a MidAmerican substation provides ample power for the facility..."

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“While we aren’t announcing the data center project at the moment, the council’s action moves plans forward,” said Kittrell. The site plan for a data center in Waukee calls for a 46,000 square foot facility to be built in three phases.  The project has a price tag of $14 million. The center would employ 11 people earning salaries between $40,000 and $100,000.

Waukee Mayor Bill Peard said the city is thrilled to work with a company which has the potential to bring Iowa’s tech boom to his community. Google announced a large data center project for Council Bluffs last year. This month, Microsoft also announced it would locate a data center in the Des Moines metro area. The TEAM project would be smaller, but technology experts in the state say it points to Iowa’s strength in retaining and attracting high-tech companies.

TEAM Technologies is headquartered in Cedar Falls, Iowa where it operates a 25,000 square foot data farm. In addition, TEAM has just completed a data center in Fitchburg, Wisconsin just outside of Madison.

“We believe in building our centers in the Upper Midwest,” said Kittrell. “We think the region is ideal for data centers because of the low risk of terrorism, earthquakes and other natural disasters. We build our centers to withstand tornados and carefully choose sites outside of flood plains. We call our method security through obscurity,” Kittrell explained.

When choosing sites, TEAM also considers power availability, fiber availability, and progressive communities with a good understanding of what data centers do. For more information about TEAM Technologies, go to www.teamnet.net."

"It's more of a professional community, certainly, than it was a few years ago," Melland said. "It's our belief that to succeed in this business long term, you really have to create a service that helps people succeed in their careers, but also gives them a way of giving them helpful advice and increasing their knowledge about the profession."

The Urbandale-based company, which emerged from bankruptcy five years ago in the wake of the dot-com bust, has since acquired three online professional career site companies: eFinancialCareers, JobsintheMoney.com and Targeted Job Fairs. About 30 percent of Dice's revenues now come from those companies. Over the past three years, the company has nearly doubled its Urbandale staff to 190 people..."

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"The good news is we're well up on the hill in the industrial park, and we didn't have any problems with water," Kittrell said, referring to Team Technologies' Prairie Lakes Data Center in the Cedar Falls Technology Park. "The challenges we ran into very quickly were more related to how we could keep our center going."

They did, and, as a result, the onslaught from the Cedar River threatened, but did not breach, storage and connectivity for a number of basic service operations.

"We spent about 24 hours very much in communications with those folks, making sure power stayed on and cable stayed going," Kittrell said. "Thank goodness we were able to work our way from that."

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Steve Purcell, Mediacom's west region vice president, said the early users will be hard-core Internet users with special needs for entertainment and big data downloads.

"They've been on the broadband for a while, and they'll seek us out," Purcell said.

Those old enough to remember agonizing days watching the hourglass on the 2.8 kilobit Internet of the early 1990s no doubt marvel at the increased speeds. The Web moved first to Digital Subscriber Line, or DSL, service in the late 1990s and earlier in this decade, and then to the fuller fiber optic broadband that Mediacom and other cable television companies have introduced."

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“The flood on the Cedar and other rivers quickly exceeded anyone’s worst expectations,” said Mark Kittrell, TEAM’s vice president of business development. “Our data center in Cedar Falls remained high and dry and experienced 100% uptime during the entire disaster period. We choose our sites with safeguards against disasters, including floods, in mind. TEAM’s centers continued running, while other businesses were in danger of losing valuable business uptime and technology infrastructure.”

That included one of TEAM’s data center customers, Iowa Health System (IHS). The health care company, which operates 11 hospitals and 135 clinics in the state, stored some of its critical data in a building in downtown Cedar Rapids. IHS is careful to build redundancy into its data system by storing data in various locations. One of those locations is the TEAM data center in Cedar Falls. “We called TEAM when we knew our building in Cedar Rapids was going to flood,” said Jim Mormann, vice president and CIO at Iowa Health System. “We moved 130 servers from the basement of our office in downtown Cedar Rapids to the TEAM data center in Cedar Falls. It was quite the effort, but our servers were running again within 12 hours thanks to the staff at TEAM.”

Mormann pointed out the servers moved to Cedar Falls stored information directly related to patient care. “Because of the expertise and quick work of the TEAM Technologies staff, we were able to continue to serve patients across the state,” he said. “The staff did a fabulous job, and we used them heavily to get through this disaster. Their quick work minimized the impact of the flood on our patients.”

The disaster recovery expertise at TEAM also helped Cedar Falls Utilities (CFU). The municipal utility took on six feet of water on its first floor as the Cedar River flood crested. “We exceeded our past flood records by six feet,” said Steve Bernard, Cedar Falls Utilities customer service director. “Our servers were safe on our second floor, but we had to find office space with internet and phone connectivity immediately. TEAM was a location we had identified in our disaster recovery plan for moving a portion of our operation.”

CFU wound up moving the majority of its employees to the TEAM data center campus. “We had ready access to phone lines at TEAM, and our customer service lines were back on within a day,” said Bernard. “The TEAM staff also set us up with furnished office space and we started our operation.” The utility also had equipment at TEAM ready to be used in an emergency. Bernard says preplanning and TEAM’s network availability allowed CFU to connect to data stored at the utility’s main site on the second floor, so customer records could still be accessed.

In addition, one of TEAM’s tenants on the data center campus, Involta, which specializes in disaster recovery of data for its customers, used TEAM’s expertise. “TEAM provided fantastic service,” said Gordon Smith, Involta’s eastern Iowa sales director. “They performed exceptionally in a high stress environment. They helped Involta help its customers.”

TEAM Technologies already had an “incident response” plan in case of disaster.  That plan allowed TEAM to immediately begin helping customers in danger of losing critical data. “We have an incident response plan specifically for helping our customers execute their disaster recovery plan,” said Jim Sutton, operations manager for TEAM. “We have an incident response manager and team prepared to monitor all situations as they unfold in a disaster. In this case, we were watching the weather, maintaining our data center’s connectivity and power sources, and staying on top of every customer’s individual needs.”

TEAM’s incident response included thorough communication with its own customers who were watching stories of the Iowa floods on national television.  The flood was nowhere near TEAM’s data center, but the pictures prompted questions about the disaster. “Our customers could call into our conference bridge 24/7 so they could get updates on what was happening in our data center,” said Mark Kittrell. TEAM also sent blast emails to customers with details of the flooding, how the Prairie Lakes Data Center was operating normally, and how staff was constantly monitoring connectivity and power sources. “Our redundant paths for fiber connectivity and power ensured TEAM and its customers had no downtime during this disaster,” said Kittrell. 

• Database Analyst
• Help Desk Technician
• Information Technology Generalist
• Project Manager
• Information Assurance Security Professional
• Network Technician
• Programmer, Engineering and Scientific (Computer Programmer/Analyst)
• Systems Analyst/Consultant.
  

Software Engineering Services is also working with the Department of Labor (DOL) on three more apprenticeship models which will be the first of their kind in DOL history. They are:

• Business Analyst
• Quality Assurance/Quality Control/Testing Specialist
• Continuity of Operations Specialist
  

The colliding trends have some business leaders worried that they won't find enough workers needed to maintain expected growth.

"There's a bit of a perfect storm going on," said Katherine Spencer Lee, executive director of Robert Half Technology, a California-based consulting and staffing service. "I do think it's serious and I do think we need to start at the elementary school level and get students talking about math and science."

Although a dearth of tech workers has been a problem before, the situation is now more dire because of soaring demand by a wide range of businesses, from tech companies like Microsoft to insurance companies and local hospitals.

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 854,000 professional IT jobs will be added between 2006 and 2016, an increase of about 24%. When replacement jobs are added in, total IT job openings in the 10-year period is estimated at 1.6 million.

The bureau estimates that one in 19 new jobs created in the 10-year period will be professional IT positions..."

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Also, view article at The Associated Press: http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5gn7sKrXKBBVFvuMX6JK4qYtSJrawD91FOO782

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