Centerbeam, Microsoft Buy Back PCs

Windows 2000 has not been officially released, but a Bay-area outsourcing company has already launched a business based on it. Centerbeam, a start-up with a management team composed of Novell and USWeb/CKS veterans, earned a lot of media attention with a promise to buy back any business’s PCs for US$500 each and to donate them to charity. But IT managers might be more interested in Centerbeam’s bet on the reliability and management features of Windows 2000.

For US$165 a month per workstation on a three-year contract, Centerbeam promises clients a turnkey, fully managed network. The company provides the PCs (400MHz Celerons or better), a local server, printers, a DSL connection to the Internet, a wireless 10-megabit-per-second network using Lucent’s WaveLAN technology, a corporate intranet site, the Microsoft Office Standard application suite, Exchange e-mail, daily offsite backup of the server and all workstations, and full technical support for the network and applications. Centerbeam is also cutting deals with other outsourcing firms and application service providers (ASPs) to give its clients easy access to e-commerce services and hosted line-of-business applications.