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FUELED BY ITS DESIRE TO UNITE ITS WORLDWIDE TECHNOLOGY FIEFDOMS, MORGAN STANLEY RECENTLY COMPLETED THE MIGRATION OF ITS LARGEST DEALING ROOM CONTINGENT TO 1585 BROADWAY. ALONG THE WAY, THE INVESTMENT BANK FORMULATED TECHNOLOGY OPINIONS THAT HAVE SHAPED THE LOOK AND FEEL OF ITS GLOBAL TRADING FLOOR COMMUNITY.
Times Square, New York City. Home to con artists and drug dealers, Broadway plays and triple x-rated theaters and.....global investment bank Morgan Stanley & Co.? That's right, Morgan lately relocated its trading headquarters to 1585 Broadway-a 28-floor tower fully equipped with the firm's latest and greatest dealing room technologies. And yes, 1585, which houses roughly 1,500 Morgan traders, is just down the street from the crossroads of the world.
But more compelling than the location of Morgan's flashy new trading facility are the stories behind the bank's migration to a modern head office and the technology vision that fueled the deployment of 1585's trading floor software and hardware.
For the skinny on those tales, one needs to look no further than Morgan's 750 Seventh Ave. office, the business residence of the information technology gurus who masterminded the technology relocation project.
Of course, before tackling the massive resettlement task-which covered the migration of not only 3,200 people but all of the bank's trading floor technologies to 1585-Morgan had to firmly establish the technology direction it was traveling in. "Technology is a game of positioning: you never have the right answer, because as soon as you implement it, it was yesterday's answer," says Sean Kelley, an I.T. principal and the head architect of Morgan's push into its new trading facility.
With Kelley's philosophy in mind, Morgan's technologists recently attacked the bank's cumbersome 1585 relocation.
The project entailed the installation of a vast range of technologies-including IPC Information Systems Inc.'s Tradenet MX turrets, an AT&T central switching system, Compaq Computer Corp. PCs, Sun Microsystems Inc. workstations, an SDS/Troy Systems Ltd. video switch and a proprietary digital data distribution system-on four large trading floors.
Moreover, the project also called for the roll out of 2,300 market data devices piping in information supplied by 65 different market data vendors.
Undaunted, the I.T. unit began the actual physical relocation of all of Morgan's business units to 1585 last August. Six months later-thanks in...