Networking remembers Bear Stearns

While some will remember Bear Stearns for the investment bank's collapse and subsequent acquisition by JPMorgan Chase this week, those of us covering the network industry for the past couple of decades will remember the company for its showcase network.

Bear Stearns for years, especially during the 1990s, was a go-to company when it came to finding out what IT pros thought about the latest and greatest technology from Bay Networks, Northern Telecom, Lucent and Microsoft. In fact, we even awarded the company our 1996 user excellence award for a network that embraced data center consolidation, OC-48 ATM and VLANs.

We wrote back then: "Consider the steps Bear Stearns has undertaken in recent months. The company is planning to nail up a second OC-48 fiber ring in the metropolitan New York area, linking company headquarters on Park Avenue to a Whippany, N.J. data center and to a backup trading floor operation in Brooklyn. And, by next June, the financial giant will string up two additional OC-48 loops with the ability to add four more down the road. " 

CTO Jeff Marshall was considered the bearer of the Good Housekeeping seal of approval for network vendors looking for an endorsement of their latest products.

The two top guys in the network shop -- Marshall and Ken Starkey eventually moved on to head a green computing company and help run Fidelity Investments’ network, respectively.

"After many years helping to build Bear into a powerhouse and now to look at it disappear is quite shocking to those of us who strove to innovate and create a firestorm of swift technology leadership on Wall Street," says Marshall, now president and CEO of Green Earth Technologies. "My staff . . . challenged themselves every day. They will continue to remember the excitement we shared . . . over the years. They were the best in the business and will carry on with duty and courage. It is certainly a sad day for many."

In 2001, we wrote about Bears move to a new data center and VoIP and what it will take to manage its new network. The company moved into a new 43-floor Manhattan high-rise equipped with IP-based voice, data and video over Gigabit Ethernet for 4,300 employees, and monitored by more than 150 Sniffer Distributed network appliances from Network Associates.

Managing this network was actually easier than managing the circuit-switched ISDN network Bear Stearns left behind because it required fewer network management tools and specialists.