News Details

CHATTANOOGA, Tenn.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--

Unum (NYSE: UNM) today announced that it ranked No. 5 on the 2008 InformationWeek 500, as revealed last night at a gala awards ceremony. Unum was recognized for its product and service platform Simply Unum, which was launched nationwide in 2008.

"Hundreds of professionals from across our business units and technology organization worked in collaboration to develop and launch Simply Unum," said Kathy Owen, senior vice president and chief information officer for Unum US. "We are so pleased to receive this recognition from InformationWeek for this innovative work."

Simply Unum was more than two years in the making and involved every department that interacts with a customer - from sales, to underwriting, to enrollment, to service, to claims. The result is a benefits solution for small to mid-sized businesses that creates one path from benefit package design to quoting to enrollment to ongoing billing and administration. It provides more than 28,000 product combinations and significant pricing flexibility.

"Simply Unum represents a very significant transformation in how we engage the small-employer market, how we deliver to employers to meet the needs of their employees," Owen said. "Now we can respond to customer needs with much greater speed and flexibility. It is a business model that will be the foundation of our future growth."

In addition to the InformationWeek 500, Simply Unum has been recognized with a 2008 Microsoft WFS Innovator Award, a Visionary Award from Exstream, and CELENT award for document automation.

"For 20 years, the InformationWeek 500 has honored the most innovative users of business technology," said InformationWeek Editor-in-Chief Rob Preston. "Year after year, InformationWeek 500 companies harness technology to improve efficiency, boost productivity, drive revenue, and establish a competitive advantage. We applaud this year's winners, and the CIOs and other executives whose ingenuity and risk taking are at the center of business technology innovation."

InformationWeek has identified and honored the nation's most innovative users of information technology with its annual listing, now in its 20th year, and has tracked the technology, strategies, investments and administrative practices of America's best-known companies. The list is unique among corporate rankings because it spotlights the power of innovation in information technology, rather than simply identifying the biggest IT spenders.

Additional details on the InformationWeek 500 can be found online at www.informationweek.com/iw500/.

About Unum (http://www.unum.com)

Unum is one of the leading providers of employee benefits products and services in the United States and the United Kingdom. Through its subsidiaries, Unum provided more than $6 billion in total benefits to customers in 2007.

About InformationWeek Business Technology Network (http://www.informationweek.com/)

The InformationWeek Business Technology Network provides business technology executives with unique perspective, market leading research and innovative tools that work in lock step with their work flow - from defining and framing business technology objectives through to the evaluation and recommendation of specific solutions. The InformationWeek Business Technology Network delivers the entire market, from SMBs with bMighty.com to large-scale global companies with InformationWeek. We scale across the most critical technology categories in the market -- security with DarkReading.com, storage with ByteandSwitch.com, application architecture with IntelligentEnterprise.com, network architecture with NetworkComputing.com and communications with NoJitter.com. Through its multi-media platform and unique content-in-context information distribution system, the InformationWeek Business Technology Network provides trusted information developed both by editors and real world CIO/IT professionals delivered how and when business technology executives want it, 24/7.

About TechWeb (http://www.techweb.com/aboutus)

TechWeb, the global leader in business technology media, is an innovative business focused on serving the needs of technology decision-makers and marketers worldwide. TechWeb produces the most respected and consumed media brands in the business technology market. Today, more than 13.3 million(1) business technology professionals actively engage in our communities created around our global face-to-face events Interop, Web 2.0, Black Hat and VoiceCon; online resources such as the InformationWeek Business Technology Network, Light Reading, Intelligent Enterprise, bMighty.com, and The Financial Technology Network; and the market leading, award-winning InformationWeek, TechNet Magazine, MSDN Magazine, and Wall Street & Technology magazines. TechWeb also provides end-to-end services ranging from next-generation performance marketing, integrated media, market research, and analyst services.

TechWeb is a division of United Business Media, a global provider of news distribution and specialist information services with a market capitalization of more than $2.5 billion.

(1) 13.3 million business decision-makers: based on # of monthly connections across TechWeb brands.

Source: Unum