In the frenzied days and weeks that followed 9/11, Lehman squeezed people and trading floors into the Jersey City building. They also found other space in Jersey City and Manhattan and even took over the Sheraton Hotel in midtown, where beds were moved out, desks were moved in, and a ballroom was reinvented as an IT hub. Other employees worked at home, accessing applications through a secure portal that had been in the pilot phase.

They weren’t the only ones to make a pilot project mission-critical. At Deutsche Bank, CIO Mitchell Lenson had been working on a virtual private network to allow remote offices to access the bank’s infrastructure. "Sept. 11 forced us to test the solution for real," Lenson said in an e-mail interview from London. "We were able to deploy location-independent access, for which we now have more than 11,000 users." That’s handy, since executives for the Frankfurt, Germany-based bank haven’t decided if its building near Ground Zero is salvageable.

At Lehman Brothers, executives didn’t want to wait to find out whether the building could be saved. In October 2001, Lehman bought a 32-story building at 745 7th Ave. being built by Morgan Stanley. This is no ordinary building and certainly not one that brings to mind the frugal investment bank spun off from American Express in 1994. First-time passersby stop to gape at more than a dozen LED screens that cover the first several floors of the building and show artistic video montages of, perhaps, the light on a wheat field as a thunderstorm rolls in.

Despite the eye candy, Lehman has been defensive about what many New Yorkers see as an abandonment of Lower Manhattan. Employees point out that they’re still in the city and say they couldn’t have waited until May for their old offices to be ready. "Wall Street is virtual; it can be anyplace," Beyman insists. "From a technology standpoint, there’s no reason to be downtown, uptown, midtown, even in New York City." The only constraint is the need to be close to customers and New York’s talent pool. Also, the trading floor’s backup systems must be within 35 miles?the distance that the optical glass fiber used for instantaneous backups can reach before the signal degrades.

Almost a year after 9/11, Lehman is still very much in recovery mode. The interior of the new building is being finished, and a new data center is under construction. "It’s a greenfield, if you will," Beyman says, trying to be optimistic about the fact that Lehman still lacks redundant storage. "It’s a chance to start over again and correct whatever sins of the past you have." There will be higher availability of systems and more real-time backups, and all the direct phone lines to customers won’t terminate in one place, as they did at the World Financial Center.