1.) Merrill Lynch necessitated an updated IT infrastructure in order to maintain their competitiveness. Merrill Lynch's assets are recorded in the trillions of dollars and the most crucial aspect of their business is their IT infrastructure. In order for their assets to be safe and their clients to feel comfortable with the company managing their funds, an IT revamp was needed.
2.) According to Merrill Lynch, their IBM mainframe installation was one of their strongest strategic assets. Because Merrill Lynch's business strategy involves allowing their customers the ability to make financial transactions via the internet, there was a strong demand for a simple and coherent method for doing this. Their IT infrastructure hadbeen critical in their success but with an ever changing technical landscape, evolution of their systems was needed to remain ahead of the competition.
4.) I believe that Merrill Lynch's idea to sell of the technology that they had developed was an excellent idea. Not only did the sale likely more than pay off the R&D work that went into the creation of the new platform, but it makes the large $20+ million dollar savings that Merrill Lynch created even more impressive as it likely came at no net cost to them. The only downfall would be that their competitors could get their hands on the same software that created such a great savings for them. But depending on the sale price this could easily have been overcame by their net gain.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment