Women’s History Month: Honoring the Women Who Drive Our Success

Women’s History Month: Honoring the Women Who Drive Our Success

At Capstone IT, we pride ourselves on upholding strong values and fostering an environment for all who share those values of selflessness, empathy, execution, integrity, and forthrightness. As we celebrate Women’s History Month, we are honored to recognize and highlight the contributions of five exceptional women who have greatly impacted our organization over the years.

We have named these individuals as our newest Ascent inductees, a title awarded to Capstone IT team members based on their outstanding qualifications, including:

  • Their alignment with our core values
  • Their tenure of three or more years with Capstone IT
  • Their standing as respected leaders in their respective fields

2023 Ascent Inductees

We are proud to announce our 2023 Ascent inductees, whose achievements and leadership have made a significant impact on our organization:

Ms. Kimberly Parks has achieved noteworthy accomplishments throughout her professional career. At Capstone IT, she earned the coveted Peak Performer Award eight times as the top salesperson in her region. Her sales success places her within the top 1% of performers in her industry. Additionally, as Director of the North Branch, Ms. Parks exemplifies Capstone IT’s core value of Execution by consistently delivering results that surpass expectations. Her outstanding contributions will undoubtedly continue as she approaches nine years with Capstone IT.

Ms. Lynn Kvigne has made exceptional contributions to Capstone IT, as evidenced by her remarkable track record. She is a four-time recipient of Pinnacle Award, an annual accolade presented to the top 7% of consultants in Capstone IT, which makes her the most awarded among her peers. Ms. Kvigne’s consistent high customer evaluations attest to her exceptional abilities as an Agile and Servant Partnership Leader. She models the value of Selflessness by generously sharing her expertise with others. Her dedicated service and unwavering commitment have spanned 12 years of employment with Capstone IT.

Ms. Becky Fields made a significant impact during her tenure at Capstone IT. As a two-time recipient of the Summit Award, which is presented to top recruiters in the firm, she demonstrated outstanding performance, distinguishing her as a top-performing member of the team. Ms. Fields played an instrumental role in the establishment of Capstone IT’s recruiting team, in which she developed the company’s recruiting processes. Her contributions have been critical to the success of the organization. Ms. Fields was a valuable team member at Capstone IT for five years who modeled Execution as she brought her exceptional skills and expertise.

Outstanding Board of Advisors Members

We also honor two women who serve on our Board of Advisors

Ms. Sharyl Ronan is the CEO at Hillcrest Health Services, where she has demonstrated exceptional leadership and guided her team through the significant challenges of providing senior healthcare during the pandemic. Her extensive experience and expertise in leadership and entrepreneurship make her a valuable advisor to Capstone IT. She gives the company valuable insights into scaling, capital management, and leadership development. As a member of the Board of Advisors, Ms. Ronan contributes her knowledge and insights to help guide the company’s strategic direction. Her three years of service on the board have been key in advancing the company’s goals and objectives.

Ms. Cheryl Jones is a highly accomplished Executive IT and Transformation Consultant with extensive experience in Agile coaching and delivery. She brings a wealth of knowledge and expertise to Capstone IT, particularly in change and communication management, strategic planning, and IT executive customer experience. Her insights have proven invaluable in helping the company navigate complex challenges and achieve its strategic objectives. As a member of the Board of Advisors, Ms. Jones provided dedicated service to Capstone IT for four years.

 

Capstone IT deploys VMware-hosted MSP solution to streamline data management for booming agribusiness

Capstone IT deploys VMware-hosted MSP solution to streamline data management for booming agribusiness

OSHKOSH, Nebraska – Capstone IT, an IT solutions and staffing company, has successfully deployed a managed service provider (MSP) solution for Oshkosh Heifer Development (OHD), a leading producer of dairy cattle. Hosted on VMware’s Tanzu platform and designed by Capstone IT, the solution has modernized OHD’s existing software platforms into a single, cloud-based application to consolidate and manage colossal production-related data sets. The project effectively automates what was once a time-consuming, manual process, opening the door for OHD’s exponential growth.

Agribusiness generates a massive amount of data, especially when it comes to raising dairy cattle. The details of harvest contracts—including contract creation, tracking incoming receivables from six annual harvests, and paying farmers and vendors for harvest-related expenses—are enough to populate years’ worth of spreadsheets. Factor in the monitoring of individual cows in a herd of more than 25,000 animals—feed intake, health regimens, weight fluctuations, and pregnancy status—and the information becomes much more expansive.

Since its inception, OHD had been tracking this data manually, but as the company grew, the amount of staff time necessary to manually input this information became unwieldy. Leadership saw the need to consolidate data and automate the process. According to Bill Matzke, Chief Nutritionist & Partner for OHD, the ideal solution didn’t exist—yet.

“There just wasn’t a good data analysis package within the dairy industry that could integrate all of the software we use,” he said. “But we received a recommendation from a family member who used Capstone IT’s services to set up a data warehouse for agricultural data. We decided to move forward to bring our complex feed-buying and internal production processes into a usable cost set.”

Capstone IT’s application modernization team immersed itself in the details of OHD’s business over the course of months and established an MSP built on VMware’s Tanzu Kubernetes Grid. Tanzu’s multi-cloud infrastructure provided the ideal platform to simplify operations of the large-scale, multi-cluster Kubernetes environment required by the dairy cattle producer. For example, users of Capstone IT’s custom web application can now seamlessly trace the feed from a specific truck all the way to the individual cow that consumed it. Thanks to this collaboration, OHD is increasingly able to make real-time business decisions and free up time to grow other parts of its business.

“We were amazed at how quickly Capstone IT got acquainted with our industry,” said Marc Braun, CEO & Partner for OHD. “They understood the level of accountability and traceability required in raising dairy cattle, and it spurred them on to create a solution that will push us towards new frontiers within our business.”

Capstone IT has a history of helping agribusinesses make smarter decisions based on hard data, from maintaining salmon waterways to charting disease maps for pig farmers. It’s all part of the company’s mission to help companies of all industries achieve digital transformation—especially those in agriculture that are rich with data but have been overlooked by other providers.

“Most people don’t realize the sheer amount of data generated by companies in the agricultural space,” said Jim Richards, President of Capstone IT. “We’re thrilled to provide OHD with a way to improve its workload through automation, making the business more efficient and sustainable in the process. We look forward to finding new ways to implement VMware’s robust solutions to help other agribusinesses in the future.”

Want to learn more about how Capstone can help organizations with VMware multi-cloud management? Review their VMware Cloud Native Master Services Competency.

 

Learn about a true VMware partner

 

About Capstone IT

Capstone IT is a national provider of specialized IT staffing services and technology solutions provider based in Omaha. Our specialization in application development, cloud solutions, containerization, and DevOps solutions helps organizations to navigate complex solutions. Capstone believes in serving people through the transformative power of technology, providing businesses with the opportunity to succeed, grow, and do something bigger.

 

Capstone IT Announces Kimberly Parks as New Director of North Branch

Capstone IT Announces Kimberly Parks as New Director of North Branch

OMAHA, Nebraska — Capstone IT, a leading provider of IT solutions and staffing, has named Kimberly Parks as the new director of its North branch. Parks will add this responsibility to her current duties as senior director of business development for the Midwest-based firm, and the promotion comes after almost nine years of hard work and dedication.

3 Ways to Simplify Your Business Transition to a DevOps Culture

3 Ways to Simplify Your Business Transition to a DevOps Culture

When your business is dependent on quickly and regularly launching new features, iterations, or applications, your team members need to accelerate delivery without sacrificing quality. Many IT innovators suggest DevOps as an ideal way to reduce SDLC costs by 50% while speeding up delivery from request to production. However, the transition is vastly more complicated than just changing your approach.

For the uninitiated, DevOps effectively combines development and operations under one roof. Where once these two functions operated on separate islands, there is now greater collaboration across unified teams throughout the lifespan of an application or solution. Members of DevOps teams contribute to development, testing, and deployment tasks within the same timeframe. As you can imagine, this fusion of principles, practices, and tools can spur innovation, enabling your company to introduce and improve new products and services at previously unheard-of velocity.

If this sounds like a promising on-ramp to greater speed to market, you’re not wrong—and you’re not alone. Capstone IT is here to make the process as smooth as possible. Here are some tips from our team to simplify your transition to DevOps and speed up your timeline for full-scale results.

Is a Multi-Cloud Strategy Safe? Here’s What You Need to Know

Is a Multi-Cloud Strategy Safe? Here’s What You Need to Know

Now that cloud adoption has gained traction in most organizations, there are fewer conversations about whether migrating processes and workloads to the cloud is necessary. The accessibility, collaboration, and scalability of these tools has transformed the business world. However, every cloud vendor has different strengths and weaknesses, encouraging many innovators to explore ways to maximize the benefits of multiple cloud platforms.

Simply put, multi-cloud and hybrid cloud are deployment models that integrate more than one cloud. Multi-cloud strategies involve multiple providers of public cloud services (e.g., AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, etc.), each of which is responsible for a specific workload. Hybrid cloud setups, on the other hand, feature at least one private cloud or on-prem data center and one public cloud. The former solution appears more modern and streamlined on paper. Adoption of multi-cloud solutions also can’t be ignored, as 81% of public cloud users reported they were using the services of multiple cloud vendors, according to a 2020 Gartner survey.

But the question remains: is a multi-cloud strategy safe for your business? The short answer is “yes,” but there are considerations you should understand before implementing. Here’s what you need to know.

Cloud computer storage concept with digital screen

Capstone IT Shares Multi-Cloud Management Expertise at VMware Explore 2022

OMAHA, Nebraska – Capstone IT, an IT staffing services and IT solutions company, is proud to announce Glen Tindal, VP of Solutions, and Ken Rider, Solutions Architect, shared insights across two sessions at VMware Explore 2022. Their contributions to the success of this flagship multi-cloud management event further strengthened their status as a trusted partner with VMware Master Services Competency.

At VMware Explore 2022, VMware announced new capabilities in the Tanzu Application Platform (TAP) that further enhance developer and application operator experiences for any Kubernetes environment, increase supply chain security, and offer additional ecosystem integrations. VMware also announced updates to key components in Tanzu for Kubernetes Operations (TKO) including enhancements to Tanzu Mission Control and Tanzu Kubernetes Grid to simplify Kubernetes delivery, management, and reliability. “Capstone IT uses TKO and TAP as a trusted partner of VMware to help our customers accelerate innovation,” said Rider.

Capstone Labs’ Drone Delivery: A Modern Application

Capstone Labs’ Drone Delivery: A Modern Application

Capstone Labs is building an application, Drone Delivery, to support

  • research on architectural ROI for modern enterprise-scale applications
  • knowledge transfer inside Capstone IT as well as to our clients
  • development of new processes and software

Architectural decisions have a foundational effect on the life cycle of development and operational costs for an application. These decisions impact not only architectural style (monolithic, hexagonal, or microservice-based), but also broader aspects of an application as well its:

  • tech stack
  • deployment options
  • influence on team dynamics

Drone Delivery, as a working application built by the Capstone Labs team, will be studied, documented, and demonstrated to clarify the trade-offs that determine the long-term costs for an application. Along the way, we expect that new processes and software will emerge.

This article will review the key requirements that motivate the first version of Drone Delivery; forthcoming articles will delve into additional requirements, its implementation, and its theory of operation.

Considering a Job Change? Here’s How to Find the Best Fit for You

Considering a Job Change? Here’s How to Find the Best Fit for You

If you’re considering a job change, here’s a word to the wise: make sure you’re leaving for the right reasons and the right company. Grant Thornton’s 2022 State of Work in America found that 40% of people who took new jobs would consider returning to their former employer. Now, that doesn’t mean they’d be happy going back, but it does suggest they may have chosen new opportunities based on a fleeting criterion.

The driving force behind leaving a job could be one of several factors. According to the same report from Grant Thornton, of the 21% of survey respondents who took a new job, 37% cited base pay as the main issue while 27% reported a lack of advancement opportunities. It’s safe to say that these are universal motivators (as are benefits, bonuses, and autonomy in the workplace). But none of these guarantee a person’s loyalty in the long run.

Speaking of which, company loyalty as a concept seems to be eroding, giving way to a new age of restlessness in the workplace. Of all the respondents to the State of Work in America survey, 29% claim to be actively looking for a new job, regardless of satisfaction with their current role. That number jumps to an astounding 50% among employees who make more than $100,000 annually.

So how is anyone supposed to find a satisfying long-term role when considering a job change? In our experience, following these steps can help ensure you land in just the right spot.

Capstone IT 2022 Team Retreat – Honoring Our Families’ Role in Continued Growth

Capstone IT 2022 Team Retreat – Honoring Our Families’ Role in Continued Growth

During difficult times, companies grow and adapt because they’ve remained true to their core values and tapped into the transformative power of their internal assets. If Capstone IT has persisted through challenges to achieve our goals so far this year, it’s in part because of our commitment to Servant Partnership™, an accomplishment that would be impossible without our exceptional team.

But great teamwork and execution can’t happen in a vacuum. That’s why, at our annual Capstone IT 2022 Team Retreat, we wanted to underscore the amazing support system that enables our every achievement: our employees and their families. It’s through the ongoing loyalty and encouragement of those we live and work with that make our achievements on the job possible, and we strive to make sure our culture and values reflect that truth.

Does It Feel Like There Is No Room for Advancement at Work? Here’s What to Do Next

Does It Feel Like There Is No Room for Advancement at Work? Here’s What to Do Next

If you feel like you’ve hit a wall on the job, you’re not alone. A Pew Research study found that one of the major reasons 33% of U.S. workers left their jobs in 2021 was because their employer provided no path for advancement. Stagnant jobs quickly lose their luster and the current job market (372k jobs were added and unemployment held at 3.6% in June) offers opportunities to professionals who want growth.

Naturally, more people will leave their jobs in a hot market, but the challenge is finding opportunities with genuine and lasting advancement. Not every job will give you that.

Here’s how to capitalize on the good fortune of the market and find jobs that develop your career in alignment with your goals. Plus, we’ll cover how working with the right IT staffing agencies can help when you feel there is no room for advancement at work.