CDW Berbee to break ground on new data center

Madison, Wis. - CDW Berbee will officially break ground Thursday on a new enterprise data center and an office building that will double its current capabilities and provide additional office space for its growing workforce.

The facilities, which are scheduled to open in 2008, will collectively total 70,000 square feet of additional space and double CDW Berbee’s data center capabilities. The site of the data center is located in the Fitchburg Technology Campus, near CDW Berbee’s corporate headquarters.

CDW Berbee, a technology services company founded in 1993, was acquired last year by Vernon Hills, Ill.-based CDW Corp., a Fortune 500 company that would like to grow Berbee into a company with $1 billion in annual revenue. CDW has since been acquired by the Chicago-based private equity firm Madison Dearborn Partners, which has endorsed plans to grow CDW Berbee.

“The ground-breaking for our new enterprise data center comes as we approach our first anniversary with CDW," said Paul Shain, senior vice president of CDW. "It testifies to our tremendous growth in the last year, and highlights strong growth prospects for 2008.”

Phil LaForge, director of CDW Berbee’s hosting and managed services practice, said in a release that the new facility will be built with more than twice the power and cooling specifications of its existing data centers, and it will bring various business benefits. When combined with managed services, LaForge said it will provide customers with a resilient hosting platform that will help to grow their business, reduce costs, and achieve regulatory compliance.

The company has been providing hosting services for "mission critical" IT environments for more than seven years, and LaForge said the data center will enable it to meet the growing demand for top-tier hosting facilities.

CDW Berbee already has two data centers - one in Madison and one in Minneapolis. The company reports $425 million in annual revenue and employs more than 900 people in 11 Midwestern cities, including 253 in Madison, 56 each in Waukesha and Appleton, 71 in Minneapolis, and 62 in Chicago.

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