What’s New: In Brief (September 12, 2006)

The Precept Group, a full-service insurer based in Waterloo, Ontario, is donating money to help build Canada’s first solar park
The Precept Group Inc. announced it will be donating money to The Sunpark Challenge to help buy the solar panels and equipment necessary to generate clean, renewable electricity from the power of the sun.
“We are extremely pleased to support this great initiative”, The Precept Group CEO Jim McGregor said in a press release. “Being part of the development of such a progressive venture to provide renewable solar energy fits with our core value of contributing in tangible ways to our communities.”
The insurer notes that solar parks are used extensively in Europe and Japan to generate electricity from sunlight, but they have never yet been implemented in Canada. “The solar panels used in a solar park don’t cause pollution or emit any greenhouse gases that can cause global warming, and are capable of producing electricity in a safe, environmentally friendly way for many decades,” the company noted in its release.

Allstate Insurance Company of Canada has outsourced their messaging systems to messaging service provider Ceryx Ceryx.
Allstate Canada announced it has migrated to Microsoft Exchange 2003, replacing their internal Microsoft Exchange 5.5 system with a secure, redundant and dedicated system managed by Ceryx.
“Challenged with the increasing demands their e-mail system put on its IT resources, Allstate Canada looked for ways to focus their resources on improving operational effectiveness,” the company announced in a press release. “It recognized its Exchange 5.5 server needed to be upgraded.”
However, the company further noted, an internal mail system upgrade would require new hardware expenses, staff training and further IT resources. In the process of planning an upgrade, Allstate Canada said it felt it was a perfect opportunity to evaluate outsourcing their mail system to a vendor that specializes in e-mail.
“We needed to alleviate current and future resource issues and requirements needed to manage an exchange environment,” according to Juha Tuominen, IT project manager for Allstate Insurance Company of Canada. “We needed to get the IT team focus back to supporting Allstate Canada’s core business, insurance.”