TowerGroup estimates that it will cost approximately US$3.2 billion to replace the technology destroyed at securities firms affected in the World Trade Center disaster.

About US$1.7 billion will be spent on hardware (trading stations, sales stations, workstations, PCs, servers, printers, mini-computers, storage devices, cabling, communications hubs, routers, switches, and the like). The remaining US$1.5 billion would cover the services and software needed to install and connect the network, operating system, and applications infrastructures of these securities firms.

TowerGroup says it believes 30,000 workstations in securities firms were destroyed in the seven World Trade Center buildings, and that there were another 15,000 to 20,000 that will need to be replaced in the adjacent buildings.

Its estimates are predicated upon the approximately 16,000 trading desks (including turrets, multiple workstations—outfitted with multiple flat screen displays) at approximately US$52,000, and 34,000 general PC workstations at a replacement cost of US$5,000 (including monitors, extra memory, software, and networking equipment).

The firm estimates that approximately 13,000 servers were lost at an approximate replacement cost of another US$370 million. It also estimates that approximately US$300 million in printers, hubs, switches, data storage, and other networking hardware will be needed to support the vast network of technology that was lost.

“The expenditures for replacement of this equipment will not happen overnight. Currently, many firms are working out of their disaster recovery sites and will continue to work out of secondary and tertiary sites. We believe that this spending will occur over then next 12–24 months as firms either rebuild existing sites, which may be damaged but are habitable, or find new sites and relocate. While the spending that will be needed to replace the technology will be large, it will not compare to the loss of life and dislocation of hundreds of thousands of people impacted both physically and psychologically by this disaster.”