Winstar Communications Inc. (www.winstar.com) has announced plans to open four new Internet data centers, bringing its total number to seven.
The new centers are in New York, Minneapolis, San Francisco and Brussels, Belgium. The centers in Brussels and Minneapolis are operational now. Winstar has established data centers in Boston, Seattle and Washington, D.C.
The data centers are an essential component of Winstar's drive to become an application service provider. Last month, a syndicate led by Microsoft Corp. (www.microsoft.com) invested $900 million in the New York-based, fixed wireless CLEC. Microsoft itself contributed $200 million of that amount, and agreed to license its leading, branded applications, including Office 2000, to Winstar, which will provide those application services to its small-business customers.
Company officials say they will go beyond Office 2000 as the year unfolds, offering other Microsoft applications: Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft SQL Server; financial, human resource, corporate purchasing and customer relationship management applications from several software vendors.
