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Each year, Network World honors user organizations that best demonstrate innovative or effective use of network technology to achieve business objectives. We continue the tradition here, showcasing the winner and two runners-up in our 1999 User Excellence Award competition.
This year's winner, Olsten Staffing Services, is a world leader in staffing services and a major division of the $4.6 billion Olsten Corp. In order to better serve its hundreds of thousands of full-time employees and temporary workers, Olsten overhauled its campus and wide-area networks, as well as the applications running on them. The three-year project saw the ouster of an AS/400-based multidrop, dial-in environment and the arrival of Unix servers, frame relay and ATM, as well as business-critical enterprise resource planning applications. The company's unwavering dedication to meeting business objectives secured its win.
Read the Olsten profile.
The first runner-up, Western Heights School District, educates students from kindergarten through high school in Oklahoma City, and it teaches us that convergence can work - today. It has spent the past five years building a converged voice-and-data network in order to enable better teaching methods. The district can now support video and distance learning on the same fiber with which it accesses the Internet, e-mail services, makes phone calls and runs data applications. For its innovation in education and commitment to convergence, it gets a gold star.
Read the Western Heights School District profile.
The second runner-up, Trottner-McJunkin, shows U.S.-Mexican relations at their best. The company is a 50-50 joint venture between McJunkin, a U.S. distributor of industrial products, and Casa Trottner, a similar Mexican firm. To smooth business operations, Trottner-McJunkin integrated international voice and fax traffic onto a cross-border frame relay network. It earns kudos for accomplishing its data connectivity goals while reducing international telephony bills and the overall cost of existing leased-line networks.
Read the Trottner-McJunkin profile.
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