Windstream making investment to upgrade data services

LITTLE ROCK, ARK.: Fast-growing Windstream Corp. plans to spend more than $1 billion this year as it moves from being a landline phone company to a broadband and data services provider.

The Little Rock-based company has been rapidly setting up data centers that provide computing power and storage for businesses around the country and using its phone network as a vehicle for linking business clients to the data centers.

Windstream employs 850 in Ohio, including 584 in Summit County. Employees are in a number of offices throughout the county, including two facilities in Twinsburg, a call center that handles consumer requests for voice and broadband repair, and an IT center that houses servers, said spokesman Scott Morris.

The greater part of its business in phone lines

Windstream for all that has the greater part of its business in phone lines and residential bundles of phone, Internet and satellite TV services, which reach clients in mainly rural areas in more than two dozen states.

But it’s targeting the data end of the market in urban and rural areas as large and small businesses turn to cloud computing and other data outsourcing.

It as well made two major acquisitions to quickly expand its data business. In late 2010, Windstream bought Raleigh, N.C.-based Hosted Solutions LLC for $310 million. Last August, Windstream announced the purchase of New York-based Paetec Holding Corp. for $891 million.

The decline

CEO Jeff Gardner said that with landline usage on the decline, the company quickly started looking for business segments it could grow.

“Our view of the world was simply that we needed to get more enterprise focused and that we needed to invest and focus on businesses that were more growth oriented, when all is said and done our natural focus at the time was on enterprise businesses and the fastest growing space in the enterprise arena is cloud computing,” he said.