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Like so many of their financial services colleagues, employees at Bear Stearns will have to get accustomed to a brand new office environment. However, fortunately the relocation of roughly 4,200 Bear Steams staffers is not being done out of fear or necessity. For the past four-and-a-half years, the invest ment banking/brokerage firm has been in planning/designing/ testing mode in preparation for a migration of its head office from 245 Park Ave. to 383 Madison Ave. And despite the terrorist acts that rocked the center of the business universe on Sept. 11, Bear Steams has every intention of following through with a staged move to its new headquarters, starting Oct. 5.
The octagon-shaped 383 Madison office will be packed with all sorts of modem technology, including video walls, remote data centers, multimedia rooms and, most significantly, four new trading floors equipped with the latest flat-panel-- display monitors, PCs and programmable trading telephones-or turrets.
Each of the firm's 1,250 trading positions, spread across two equity floors and two fixed-income floors, will be equipped with an IPC-supplied voice over IP turret and a pair of FPD monitors from Eizo Nanao Technologies. The trading desks will also feature wireless hoot n' holler capability and Dell Computer PCs, which will be stored underneath each desktop in an effort to save space.
Every trading floor will also run a host of TVs displaying either CNN or CNBC, and every trader will have a "100 percent viewing angle" of those television programs, says Don Henderson, managing director of Bear Steams' information technology group. Part of the firm's mission, he says, is to equip each desktop with technology standards-systems that interact with each other smoothly and efficiently. "The desktop is equipped with 99 percent standard technology .... (and) we also have made (each desktop) completely integrated. The voicemail can talk to the PC, the PC talks to the phone system (and) the phone system talks to the turret system," says Henderson, noting that the firm expects to complete its move by next March.
Geryl Darington, senior managing director and chief technology officer at Bear Steams, says the firm really wanted to avoid performing "big software upgrades at the same time" it is doing a "major relocation." However, Bear Stearns is making a few...