Newton AD Agency Location Determination

Newton advertising agency is looking to expand its business and network. Newton ad Agency already has multiple locations in the United States. The offices are located in the following areas: Austin TX (includes a satellite office two miles away), Minneapolis MN, and New York NY. When looking at the map, the locations are located within the Midwest spreading to the west coast. This is something to keep in mind when deciding on a new location. It should also be noted that the location in Austin, TX is the headquarters of the Ad agency housing over 750 people along with 100 at the satellite office. The other two offices only have around 200 employees each. Although they are smaller they need to be taken into consideration when thinking about the capabilities they will need to have when it comes to connecting to the new location. The new location will need the capability to reliably connect to teleconferencing calls. Interruption to these connections could prove to have a very negative impact on business that is being conducted. The new location should also have the ability to easily send print jobs to the satellite office in Austin. This will have a large play on the location because the ability to send these print jobs needs to be completed in a quick, safe, and efficient manner.

The potential locations that are up for consideration are the following: Tacoma WA, Rochester NY, and Fayetteville North Carolina. We can instantly eliminate Tacoma WA as a location because of the distance from the location to the satellite location outside of Austin. The time it would take to send something from Tacoma to Austin successfully would not be worth the hassle. It also is out of the general area of any of the other locations we currently have. Choosing this location would would be detrimental in trying to schedule meetings and conferences as the time zones are off by 2 hours at least. We could eventually expand to this location one day but it would be smarter to do it slowly instead of spreading out the business now. We are not left with the locations in New York and North Carolina. They are both similar in distances but there is one main factor that comes into play. We already have a location in New York. Having another location near this area could prove to be helpful as it would essentially be a satellite location to New York, NY just like the Austin location has. This could increase productivity and connectivity as we already know the ins and outs of the area. The new location would also have the New York, NY location to help them in case things were to happen. As we know, New York is a very businesses minded city that is heavily populated. The chances of finding new recruits to join the new Vision Program in this selected area would be easy. This essentially eliminates the Carolina area for me. The new Rochester location will be the home to 50 employees including the new executive vice president of sale and marketing. Although the considered locations are similar in nature and provide the fastest and most reliable in internet services (cable, fiber, and T1) and are also located on the 3rd floors of their respective buildings, the geography proves to be the leading deciding factor. In order to easily connect this location to our network we could easily just use a hub/switch along with a router to get it up and running.

There are man different types of LAN topologies that we can choose from when deciding how to set up the new location. Mesh Topologies are connected with various connected between nodes (Beal, 2011). Although this is useful, there are better options to choose from. Star Topologies are connected to one central location. Computers then communicate through this network by going through the centralized hub. The down side to this is that if one system fails, the whole network fails. This is definitely not the ideal pick for the new location. Ring Topologies is where the computers are connected in a closed loop (Beal, 2011). This appears to be ideal but if one node goes down, so do the others because of the loop system. Tree topologies are similar to a bus topology but instead they branch off into different groups, hence the "tree" in its name. The disadvantage to this is if the bus were to go down, the whole "tree" would be chopped down as well. Last but not least, the Bus Topology connect all of the devices by funneling the connections through a Local Area Network (LAN). This topology would quickly get us off our feet and is inexpensive. This would be my chosen path because the only disadvantage to this type of typology is the threat of the main line going down. The way to counter act this would be to shield this main line through a thick pipe to ensure connectivity is not interrupted.