News

Sandhills Publishing Set to Break Ground on Additional IT Facility in Mid-October

Plans for new IT facility on Sandhills Publishing's campus.

Sandhills Publishing is pleased to announce the construction of an additional facility on its 68-acre main campus in Lincoln, Nebraska. The new building will be adjacent to the company’s Data Center and will house 122 employees specializing in software development, networking, and server management including Web developers, mobile developers, database developers, user interface designers, network administrators, and other IT personnel. The expansion will bring the total office space on the Lincoln campus (which currently houses nearly 600 employees) to over 220,000 square feet, and will also help accommodate the company’s growing sales force.

Investments in infrastructure and a focus on further developing and integrating hosted technologies and mobile applications have made Sandhills a leader across the trucking, agriculture, construction, heavy equipment, aviation, and technology industries. The new facility is a timely arrival as Sandhills continues to broaden the scope of hosted cloud-based technology services and platform agnostic mobile business solutions. Steady growth in the demand for Sandhills’ services among major industry players including OEMs (Original Equipment Manufacturers), market leaders, and large dealer conglomerates is a key factor in the campus expansion. "We have continued to see growth throughout the company in regard to information processing, particularly with the software applications and tools we have developed and are continuing to develop for the markets we serve," explains Vice President of Sales and Marketing Shawn Peed. "This was the reasoning behind building the Data Center two years ago, and now this facility."

The high-availability data servers on the Lincoln campus function in tandem with the Scottsdale Data Center to ensure secure, reliable service for Sandhills’ customers and end-users. Load balancing technologies operating between the two facilities allow for increased speed and efficiency by distributing Web traffic across the geographically disparate server farms, allowing Sandhills to operate as a global service provider with the support of Sandhills East (which includes 55 employees in offices across Spain, Luxembourg, and the United Kingdom) and Sandhills Pacific (a 21-member team based out of Australia). The high-availability infrastructure contributes 432 terabytes of raw disk storage, ensuring ample capacity for the over 16 million media assets stored and processed daily on Sandhills’ proprietary multimedia program—with plenty of room to accommodate future growth.

Today Sandhills distributes over 5 million publications every month to audiences around the world. Sandhills’ websites receive more than 13 million visitors each month, and the company hosts over 6,500 custom-designed websites and over 13,000 CRM user accounts to help grow the businesses of its more than 12,300 customers worldwide. The outcome is over $120 billion in assets moving across Sandhills’ platforms annually. "This expansion is ultimately the result of the substantial growth we’ve seen in almost every area of the company over the past 10 years," says Peed. "It will allow us to continue on with that growth, and to better accommodate the markets we serve."

Facility Design & Features

Lincoln-based Sinclair Hille Architects (www.SinclairHille.com) and Sampson Construction (www.Sampson-Construction.com) are behind the rustic design of the 21,000-square-foot facility. Constructed largely of recycled and reclaimed materials, the facility will be gold certified by the U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) program—the second building of its kind on the campus (www.usgbc.org/leed). "Being good stewards of our resources has always been a priority at Sandhills," says Peed. "Whether that means green building standards for our new facilities, recycling and reducing waste in our production area, or giving back to the communities we live and work in."

The structure’s design includes state-of-the-art technologies that increase water and energy efficiencies using features like solar panels, light harvesting sensors, and motion sensors that control plumbing and electricity. The new facility will also include one of the most advanced heating and cooling system designs in the world, a closed-loop, geothermal well field modeled after the energy-efficient system utilized in the Data Center and confirmed by the EPA to operate at significantly greater efficiency than oil furnaces, gas furnaces, and air source heat pumps. The building’s 89-stall parking structure features a living roof, which will serve as a research site for area university students. A landscaping design representative of rolling hills will pay homage to the Sandhills of Nebraska.

Sandhills expects to break ground in mid-October. The company’s internship program will continue to grow as human resources staff gear up to expand database and software development positions in particular. Sandhills also has available positions in other areas including sales, marketing, design, journalism, and human resources. Learn more about internship and career opportunities at Sandhills.