Longden Company, Inc.
Hudson, MA 01749
Testimonials
Since the 1980s, Evans Hall has been the hub for the academy’s cabling and voice and data services infrastructure and the main source of all voice and data network services provided to our more than 500-acre campus. With the upcoming blasting scheduled for the construction of the new Gelb Science Center and the demolition of Evans Hall, prior to the fall of 2001, a new campus voice and data distribution center needed to be prepared in Morse Hall and the entire voice and data infrastructure that had been developed over the past two decades needed to be relocated.
The academy’s technology and telecommunications plan called for the network equipment to be replaced when the lease expired in December 2001 and for the telephone system to be replaced in the summer of 2002. However, since we knew there would be a considerable outage for the relocation of the facilities from Evans basement to Morse Hall’s Samson Room, we tried to avoid additional outages by scheduling the replacement of those facilities at the same time. We chose mid-August to make the final switches from the old facilities to the new facilities because it was after Summer Session, before the fall term and a time when many are off-campus. And, although some anticipated a downtime of up to two weeks for similar projects, our goal was to limit the downtime to a maximum of 4 days.
We informed our community to be prepared not to have any telephone or network services from Thursday, August 9, 2001 at 5:00pm through Monday, August 13, 2001 at 5:00pm. However, through the tireless efforts of my staff and our partnered vendors Avaya, Buddy Electric, Cisco, Longden, Molin, NEC, Plan B Communications, Tocco Building Systems, and Verizon, remarkably many had their services restored on Friday morning, all telephone services were restored to the entire campus by Friday evening, and all data network services were restored to the entire campus by Sunday at 5:00pm.
I want to thank you and also to personally commend the efforts of your employees Will Fisher and Kim Gibson. Their expertise, professionalism, competence and commitment to the project were extraordinary and of a standard that all of us can be proud.
Their unwavering diligence and tireless participation on our team were indispensable and key to the success of the project.
We appreciate and applaud their hard work.
Dear John:
As the construction of GTECH’s new Enterprise Data Center nears completion, I wanted to pass on my thanks to you and your organization for the results achieved by the team who has been working tirelessly to complete this project. Being in charge of several different projects at any given time, I rely upon and trust the vendors I hire to protect GTECH on any and all issues. I truly believe that the Longden employees who have worked on this project have done just that.
In particular, I wanted to single out Greg Dumas for his work over the past year for, among other things, his eye for detail and his straight-forward communication style. He consistently let me know the challenges we were facing or were about to face, offered solutions to these challenges, and successfully implemented the solutions, all without compromising the project budget or timeline. Due to the level of confidence I had in the work he was doing, I was able to ensure that my other projects were getting the attention they deserved Had I not believed that Greg was handling the day-to-day details of the data center project, I would not have been able to do this.
Once again, thank you for working as a valuable partner to GTECH on this project.
It has been our pleasure to work with you at the MCI WorldCom Switch Expansion Project in Charlton, MA. You have been instrumental in helping Tishman Construction Corporation meet the aggressive schedule. Your company’s level of professionalism was excellent and we look forward to future projects with Longden Company.