The following story was time stamped at 9:40 A.M. today. Probably affected trading on previous day as there are always those who know ahead of time.
BusinessWire, Tuesday, September 24, 1996 at 09:40
BusinessWire, Tuesday, September 24, 1996 at 09:40
HOPKINTON, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Sept. 24, 1996-- UNUM Corp.,
one of the world's leading disability insurers, announced it has
finalized the strategic conversion of its entire 1.5 terabytes of
information to EMC Symmetrix information storage and retrieval
systems.
Symmetrix systems now support UNUM's entire information systems
environment including claims processing, underwriting and policy
administration, sales and marketing, producer compensation, actuarial automation, portfolio management, decision support, finance, human resources, electronic mail, and all other applications including the Internet in the near future.
Symmetrix performance has enabled UNUM to increase its overall IS
productivity more than 50 percent; in several application areas,
performance improvements have greatly exceeded 50 percent. For
instance, through Symmetrix, UNUM has reduced its year-end closing
process from three weeks to two days, and now performs nightly claims processing in two hours, as opposed to 10 hours with their previous storage systems. With increased capacity, Symmetrix systems also enabled UNUM to reduce the company's total storage systems floor space from 10,000 to 100 square feet.
"The impact EMC has on our overall system performance and
information availability is both strategic and operational to the
company's current and future competitive positions," Robert Malik,
UNUM's Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer. "Where storage was once a peripheral decision, it's now a central element and one we consider of strategic importance to the value of
information at UNUM. UNUM's database represents the largest of its
kind in the world and must be protected. We must also provide our
customers with fast, reliable, and continuous service."
Consolidation Through Software In order to take control of the company's distributed information, and lower operational costs, UNUM recently undertook a major data center consolidation. Using EMC's Symmetrix Remote Data Facility (SRDF) software, UNUM electronically transferred all 1.3 terabytes of information stored in its Portland, Maine headquarters to its Columbia, South Carolina data center while all applications remained online. UNUM remotely mirrored all of its information over T3 telecommunications lines to a separate Symmetrix located in Columbia, S.C. UNUM prides itself on three core competencies -- one of which is risk management. "Without the benefits of SRDF software, we would have had to physically move all our disk drives from one location to the other," added Malik. "Aside from being extremely time consuming, the potential pitfalls and possibility of data loss associated with physically moving disk drives proved far too risky to the business."
UNUM Corp. (NYSE:UNM) is a publicly held disability and
special risk insurance holding company based in Portland, Maine that
trades on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol UNM. Through
its affiliates, UNUM is the world leader in disability insurance and
ranks among the world's leading special risk insurers. UNUM's
affiliates are leading providers of group long term disability
insurance in North America and the United Kingdom, as well as
providers of other employee benefits, including group life insurance,
long term care insurance and payroll-deducted supplemental insurance
products offered to employees at their worksites. UNUM and its
affiliates have approximately 6,900 employees and offices throughout
the United States, Canada, the UK and the Pacific Rim.
EMC Corp., based in Hopkinton, Mass., is the world's
leading independent supplier of enterprise-wide intelligent
information storage and retrieval technology, designing systems for
mainframe, open systems and midrange environments. The company has
offices worldwide, trades on the New York Stock Exchange under the
symbol EMC and is a member of the S&P 500 Index. For further
information about EMC products and services, EMC's home page can be
accessed at emc.com.
----IMHO It's a nice PR piece that should help sales. Hope to get a little price momentum going before the next insider trade sends EMC south again. ---Sam |
