IBM lab being closed

It's Lycos redux.

Another of Pittsburgh's original Carnegie Mellon University-originated software start-up stars is fleeing Pittsburgh, taking 136 jobs with it.

IBM Pittsburgh Lab, the former Transarc Corp., is being dismantled and consolidated in a Raleigh, N.C., office of its behemoth corporate parent. The move is effective May 20.

International Business Machines Corp. spokesman Tim Breuer said some of the employees will be offered jobs in Raleigh, while others may catch on with IBM's Pittsburgh software services office, depending on their skills.

Those not offered employment will receive between eight and 26 weeks of severance pay, in addition to job training and placement services, Breuer said.

Although Transarc has been a wholly owned subsidiary of IBM since 1994, employees there have been considered by IBM as corporate employees since 1999, said one of the employees affected by the change, who did not want to be identified.

This means most employees will only receive the minimum eight-week severance.

After the move, IBM will employ 480 people in Pittsburgh, primarily in sales and customer service, but no software developers. Most of the remaining employees are in the Four Allegheny Center building on the North Side.

Transarc was founded in 1989 out of Carnegie Mellon University with an investment from IBM.

Transarc moved out of the Gulf Tower into the former Westinghouse Building at 11 Stanwix St. in 1999. It originally focused on early Internet file sharing technology. It most recently had been involved in developing software to balance the load of requests for Web pages on Internet servers and for cacheing frequently requested pages.

Lycos also was founded at CMU by computer scientist Michael Maudlin, who developed search engine software during a lull in working on government funded research projects.

He and CMU sold the company to a Boston investment firm in 1995, and the headquarters was moved there in 1996. Lycos was subsequently bought by the Spanish firm Terra Networks in 2000 and was renamed Terra Lycos.