With 2 million stock options dangled before him, Louis Gerstner has agreed to stay at the IBM helm for five more years. Gerstner, Big Blue's chairman since 1993 and before that top dog at RJR Nabisco and American Express, told The Wall Street Journal that he considers his job only half complete: "The first [phase] was to get from survival to strength, and now we need to go from strength to leadership."
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Following last month's woolly days of record trading volume, the Nasdaq stock market is beefing up its infrastructure to more than double its speed and trading capacity. Thursday, the market announced a US$600 million contract with MCI to replace its existing system.
Although the current network managed to support a record 1.37-billion-share day on 28 October, the massive intranet that MCI will build is designed to handle 4 billion shares a day and can be scaled to double that when things really get rolling.
In the first 18 months of MCI's six-year contract - which at $600 million makes it the company's largest commercial outsourcing project - the company will upgrade the system to a high-speed Internet protocol network running at speeds of up to 45 Mbps. In addition to the intelligent node architecture designed by MCI, the system will incorporate Digital Equipment Corp. services, AlphaServer computers, and Cisco 7500 series and 12,000-gigabit switch routers. (20.Nov.97)
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MS-ZD-CNET alliance: Cracking another hole in the wall of fees that keeps non-members out of the Microsoft Network's content, Microsoft today opened up to the public at large a preview of Computing Central. The revamped Computing on the MSN site, which is now essentially an aggregation of industry news provided by CNET and Ziff-Davis, offers access to a database of resellers and a library of downloadable software.
Promoted on the preview of the site are the soon-to-launch Computers.com site - a compilation of hardware reviews and other consumer tips produced by CNET - and ZD NetBuyer. (20.Nov.97)
Reuters contributed to this report.
