This article talks about Scottrade's improvements in its network. There is a plan to increase its branch offices to 500 over the next 2 years. The branches of Scottrade are its main line to its customer's and by supporting these branches with an MPLS WAN (multiprotocol label switching wide area network), which would link them to its headquarters in St. Louis. Qwest Communications is the IT company onboard with Scottrade for this project. This project has greatly increased Scottrade's service capabilities through the increased bandwith, quality of service, and diagnosis of data flow that Qwest has implemented for Scottrade. The customer service side of Scottrade is not the only internal benefit, but helping by leveraging wiki with experts in the branches, streaming monthly updates from the CEO, which would not be possible with their old network.
In recent news with the LSE outage there have been talks about disaster plans. With their new network Scottrade's own disaster backup plan is much stronger, which in turn means a more reliable company when it comes to trusting their technology. After implementing this new network with Qwest and also help from Cisco, Scottrade has had a 15% annual growth in its branches as well as moving 10 to 20 each year for better locations.
After the the outage at the London Stock Exchange many people have become aware of the possibility of huge loses through technological glitches. Scottrade has moved into an excellent direction through improving its network to better secure/prepare itself from these problems, which would make it look much better to an investor when looking for a place to invest their own capital. They not only are working to limit the damage that could occur through outages, but also have improved their customer service through the upgrade of their network with Qwest Communications. When investing money these are two key areas: limited technological glitches and customer service. They are able to connect to a local branch where they can become familiar with that person and have that representative have a faster workflow and better information.
http://www.wallstreetandtech.com/it-infrastructure/showArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=JBDDQZDW4210GQSNDLPCKH0CJUNN2JVN?articleID=210601060
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In this article you talk about how the upgrade of Scottrade's technology will help to prevent glitches like that in the LSE. However, the glitch in the LSE was due to a new software that they were using. However, LSE did not have a very good backup plan. While they did have their systems up and running again by 12pm they did not account for the excess of people trying buy/sell again when they got back online causing it to go down again.
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