CenterBeam

Windows® 2000 Professional and Server operating systems make CenterBeam’s business possible. "We could not run our business without the reliability and manageability it gives us," says Sheldon Laube, CenterBeam’s chairman and CEO. "It means that our business can actually work."

Company Profile
CenterBeam, Inc. provides small businesses with complete IT outsourcing services. Using Microsoft solutions, the Santa Clara-based company remotely manages its customers' IT over high-speed DSL lines.

Making IT Work
Information Technology (IT) infrastructures are increasingly complex, requiring expensive human resources and equipment, and a lot of hassle. CenterBeam lets small and medium-sized businesses completely outsource their IT, and purchase it entirely as a service. CenterBeam provides and maintains the PCs, printers, networking, enterprise management, backup, and security—for a single monthly fee. Businesses no longer have to worry about making IT work.

But CenterBeam does. Their platform must be super-stable and manageable for a multitude of global customers at once. According to CenterBeam, Windows 2000 Server has made it possible to deliver the solutions they have created.

Rock-Solid Platform—Reliable and Stable
Since the company started in early 1999, CenterBeam reports only one crash among its 50 servers, desktops, and notebooks installed with Windows 2000. "It never crashes," says Laube. "Windows 2000 is the most reliable operating system ever developed for the PC architecture. The user experience is: 'This system works all the time.'"

A New Business Model Enabled Thanks to Manageability
While most IT departments manage thousands of people in one company, CenterBeam must remotely manage hundreds of thousands of people in separate companies. The Microsoft Active Directory^TM service feature is particularly important because the company must provide authentication and security for all users in multiple separate organizations. One Active Directory service manages everybody. "It’s the only way we can manage user permissions in separate organizations," says Laube. "Users can use offline folders, so you can copy from your notebook to a server, log on to a new machine, and have automatic synchronization wherever you get on."

CenterBeam runs Microsoft Exchange, the Microsoft Outlook 2000 messaging and collaboration client, and Microsoft SQL Server^TM version 7.0 for its customers, who are connected remotely over DSL lines, and centrally administers all of it using Active Directory. The synchronization between Active Directory and Exchange is a great new feature of Windows 2000, says Laube.

The System Policies feature is also tremendously useful; administrators can control user access in detail while letting users do what they need to do. "We can actually protect parts of the system like network drivers to make sure that a user can’t change them," says Laube. "It used to be that either a user had complete access or nothing at all—you couldn’t even install an application."

Laube finds Windows 2000 to be easy to use, with a clean, more obvious interface, even with the new features. "And the fact that the same operating system can run on both the server and client side gives consistency," he says. "Everything can run everywhere, simplifying the whole process."