Rebuilding the IT infrastructure of New York's Wall Street is
expected to cost approximately £2.25bn, according to a report by
TowerGroup, a financial services research company.
Full restoration of the securities trading firms that lost trading
floors, offices, and systems in last week's bombing of the World
Trade Centre is expected to take place over the next 12 to 24
months, TowerGroup officials.
"We believe that 30,000 securities positions [trading, sales,
research, and operations] were destroyed in the seven World Trade
Centre buildings," said Larry Tabb, vice-president of securities
and investments research practice at TowerGroup.
Tabb also estimates that another 15,000 to 20,000 positions will
need to be replaced in the buildings adjacent to the World Trade
Centre towers: the World Financial Centre - where Lehman Brothers
Holdings and Merrill Lynch have offices - and the Bankers Trust
building.
Part of the £2bn plus price tag will be £1.2bn spent on hardware
such as workstations for traders and salespeople, PCs, servers,
minicomputers, storage devices, cabling, communication hubs,
routers and switches, Tabb said.
TowerGroup's calculations are based upon the need to replace 16,000
trading desks with flat-screen monitors at £36,000 each, and 34,000
workstations at a replacement price of £3,500 per desktop
system.
The specialised desktop trading technology often includes multiple
monitors, extra memory, and systems that have to support a variety
of market data feeds and activity analysis software as well as
proprietary software.
Before the rebuilding can start, firms have to relocate their
personnel and set up disaster recovery sites in order to sustain
their businesses.
"The World Trade Centre is filled with offices. It's not an area
where you'll find massive mainframe data centres, which are
typically located in more suburban locations," said Jim Simmons,
group chief executive officer of SunGard, one of the disaster
recovery firms helping to get Wall Street firms back on their
feet.
SunGard's clients "needed desks, chairs, phones, fax machines -
everything you need to get a business back up and running on the
people side - as well as some mid-sized or distributed computing
systems," Simmons said. There were also recovery services for large
server networks and communications networks, he said.
Simmons added that the "tremendous relocation of people" added an
extra dimension to the situation.
"We're using six of our centres along the Eastern seaboard from
Boston down to Orlando," Simmons said. "We've got a couple of
hundred people working in Jersey City. We've had a couple of
hundred working in our Philadelphia office as well as Boston,
Washington, Atlanta and Orlando. And just the human emotion
surrounding the events has made this different."
Restoring the phones
The restoration of a working
telephone service is vital.
Telecommunications carriers such as WorldCom offered co-location
and temporary office space to displaced corporations and workers,
said spokeswoman Linda Laughlin.
"We were very lucky because we had just completed a large overbuild
in the area, because our data services had grown so fast in the
financial district," Laughlin said. "We had quite a bit of capacity
that hadn't been sold, so our network engineers and planners could
use that for companies and to meet the needs of city and state
officials."
In all, WorldCom reported no disruptions to data networks,
including ATM, Frame Relay and Internet-related services in the
lower Manhattan area.
"We have looked at our office space, including warehouses and
technical space, and offered offices to those affected," Laughlin
said. "This has included cubicles, furniture and phone lines. Many
offices were able to go to these locations and be ready as the
financial markets opened."
Laughlin said that other financial customers moved to satellite
offices in New York and New Jersey and the carrier worked to
re-route circuits for that activity.
Local phone company Verizon Communications estimated last week that
between 9,000 and 14,000 New York businesses were affected, though
the figure includes many smaller entities such as grocery stores
and news-stands.
Verizon first focused on the circuits and services feeding
essential operations such as hospitals and healthcare centres, said
Ivan Seidenberg, Verizon's co-chief executive officer and
president.
Though smaller firms initially reported an inability to complete
trades via telephone systems when the market opened, Verizon
scrambled to address orders, Seidenberg said.