Since becoming a public company in 1994, Lehman Brothers has experienced tremendous growth from both a client and a business standpoint. The firm broadened its equity, fixed income, investment banking and private equity capabilities considerably, further expanding them internationally. The growing need for creative financial solutions benefited Lehman Brothers which now attracted many new clients while enhancing and developing its existing client relationships.
Growth comes at a cost.
From an information systems perspective, new employees mean new users on the network. These users require unfettered access to data and applications. This scenario certainly rang true for Lehman. Simply put, the company required greater bandwidth among its offices in the New York metropolitan area. N.J. Lehman was especially concerned that network volume and bandwidth demands would slow application and data access for its Manhattan-based trading and investment banking employees, whose applications were housed primarily in a mainframe and on a host of servers in the New Jersey data center.