IBM Corp was scheduled to make an operational announcement on its Adstar storage business in San Jose just after we closed on Friday, but we have to assume that it was not anything sufficiently dramatic that it would move the share price, otherwise the company would have had to announce it on the New York Stock Exchange before the market opened to prevent a false market operating in the shares; the announcement was to be made by vice-chairman Jack Kuehler, and was also to include some personnel news; IBM has been studying ways to separate Adstar from the rest of the company, Dow Jones & Co notes, and earlier this year, it hired Morgan Stanley & Co and the Boston Consulting Group to recommend ways to speed up the process, which could involve outside investors or a new class of IBM share – and those advisors were scheduled to be done with the preliminary work by now; a first step would likely be the creation of Adstar as a wholly-owned subsidiary – it has kept separate books since last year; but the IBM spokesman said some observers might be surprised by the announcement, which was to be concerned with Adstar’s operations as an IBM business unit and its future direction.
