Business JournalMidlands

JANUARY 7, 2010 THE WEEKLY BUSINESS PAPER OF GREATER OMAHA, LINCOLN AND COUNCIL BLUFFS VOL. 37 NO. 1

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SKC creates regional headquarters in Omaha to draw client base in Midwest

Account Executives Kristin Schmidt and Brian Vandersnick in firm's new office ... Building a physical presence for Omaha-based customers.

by Tiffany GannWhile businesses across the

U.S. were cutting back, SKC Communications was thriving on the unique opportunity to provide new options for com-munication.

A communication technol-ogy provider based out of Shaw-nee Mission, Kan., SKC is in the final stages of opening a regional office in Omaha.

SKC Communications was founded in 1986 as a Plantron-ics headset distributor and has since expanded its services to providing headsets, voice, vid-eoconferencing and audiovisual integration.

With 18 locations through-out 13 states, Omaha’s location serves as a regional headquar-ters.

Opening the Omaha office, Account Executives Kristin Schmidt and Brian Vandersnick plan to better service their Oma-ha customer base by maintaining a physical presence.

“Typically telephony, head-sets, AV and video confer-encing all used to exist in their little worlds in companies ,” Schmidt said. “I think the real push in every company now is to bring all these systems together so that they are all working as one uni-fied whole.”

With telecommuting becom-ing more common for com-panies, SKC offers products for video conferencing via the Internet.

“With a decent Internet connection now, Internet is supporting video, whereas just

a couple years ago it didn’t,” Schmidt said.

According to Schmidt, SKC has experienced a consistent growth throughout the last few years due, in part, to the eco-nomic constraints forcing busi-nesses to cut travel expenses.

“We’re providing solutions t h a t a l l o w companies to work through economic chal-lenges, and the chief one being people coming to us saying we need to save

money on travel,” she said.While working with clients

nationally, SKC Omaha’s team of four plans to grow its techni-cian and sales staff to further accommodate its local clientele base.

With about 200 employees companywide, including 50 remote sales reps, Omaha’s office will continue to expand employee numbers.

SKC’s growing staff will accommodate customers from small, single-owner shops to Fortune 400 corporations. An-other large area of SKC’s busi-ness works with the public sector including educational and health care facilities.

“We’ve always had a long-standing bulk of clients in the Omaha market, but in order to really better serve our existing customers and grow the busi-ness, we really felt like a local business that’s not three hours away would make a major dif-ference,” she said.

Utilizing the office to work more closely with Greater Oma-ha and Lincoln customers, the brick and mortar presence has also offered more structured service.

“There’s a commitment to a community that exists when you open a physical location — it shows we’re here to stay,” Schmidt said.

Additional benefits to the office are found in SKC’s re-

lationship with manufacturers. “That’s a huge bonus for our

manufacturer reps to be able to have a physical presence that they can come and they will be able to use the space as well,” she said.

As the industry continues to develop, SKC is poised to work with those changes including further integration of video com-munication outside of closed networks. Within the company’s telephony side, video has even been integrated into desktop phones.

Video conferencing has also begun to permeate the mainstream through companies like Cisco, with television com-mercials featuring its video communication products.

“I think there’s an industry prediction that in the next three years video will be the largest use of traffic on the Internet,” Schmidt said.

With these growing possi-bilities, SKC is working toward helping companies balance both interoffice and business-to-business communications.

“All of these tools are in place now that allow for com-munication globally outside of firewalls — that was probably one of the biggest hang-ups for years,” she said.

Schmidt previously worked for Gallup for 12 years where she worked in Lincoln and was relocated to Omaha. She received a broadcasting journal-ism degree from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

SKC CommunicationsAddress: 8710 F Street, Omaha 68127 (regional headquarters)Service: communication technology productsGoal: Bring physical presence to Omaha clientele. Industry outlook: Less business travel leads to increased telecommunication.Website: www.skccom.com