Only a year after it turned its Boulder, Colorado printer development laboratory over to developing customer-specific turnkey systems (CI No 1,137), IBM has decided to close the place altogether. The 540 staff at the lab are being offered transfers to other IBM locations, or the voluntary redundancy terms that were generally offered to US employees but have now expired. The company has several other operations in Boulder, notably the Publishing Systems Business Unit and internal data processing activities. The decision to close the laboratory is another reverse in what has turned into a problematic effort to build a major business out of systems integration.
