Case study

1E and Unum: 10 years of transformation

Nothing makes 1E prouder than our ten-year long relationship with Unum.

Unum is a market leader in disability, group, life long-term care, and voluntary benefits supporting more than 25 million policy holders worldwide. A Fortune 500 customer, Unum employs over 10,000 people.


Download case study

Over the last decade, Unum has successfully transformed its IT infrastructure with the help of 1E

“Every day we have employees trying to do their job, and the challenge is to make sure that continues,” says Mike Robb, Solutions Engineer, Unum. “The employees are very happy to be able to self-serve. Now they can load whatever they need to do their job. And there’s much less desk-side work to do”.

Unum needed a more efficient way to deploy software patches and upgrades to 10,000 desktops. They were also seeking a way to pare back an increasingly complex and expensive server infrastructure.

1E enabled Unum to shrink its server infrastructure in its field offices. “We’ve been able to eliminate all those servers with Content Distribution” says Giroux. “We no longer have to worry about time of day when we distribute things. With 1E we’re able to avoid any conflicts with network bandwidth, and can basically give all the bandwidth to the users for them to be more productive.”

Unum enlists 1E to prevent thousands of expensive helpdesk calls

The Unum environment encompasses over 500 packaged applications. With a lot of departmental fluidity, this previously meant regular machine rebuilds and a huge number of desk visits. In addition, Unum was looking to automate the application distribution process itself saving significant money and resources.

The Solution

By deploying Self Service, Unum prevented thousands of helpdesk calls saving an estimated $560,000 a year. “Over the last few years we’ve been averaging about 20,000 end-user installations through Self Service,” says Eric Giroux, Solutions Engineer, Unum. “When you look at the average cost of a help-desk call, there’s a lot of costs savings there for us.”

“The implementation of 1E products has been key to our success in systems management.”

Mike Robb
Solutions Engineer, Unum

Zero-touch automation, deployment and management

When Unum planned its Windows 10 migration, certain concerns were paramount. One, they wanted to achieve migration as quickly as possible. And two, they want it to be as automated as possible. Unum’s 1E infrastructure positioned them perfectly to achieve those aims.
Unum gives employees the flexibility to schedule and initiate their OS deployment. With 1E Unum has been able to shrink its infrastructure even from 23 down to about 6 servers.

Download case study