News Release

01-October 2001

InsureTech Pizzazz!™ Named “Best Use of XML” Winner and “Best Solution by a Partner” Finalist in the MEC Awards 2001 Competition

Award winners were Announced October 1^st in Orlando, Florida

Lakeland, October 1, 2001 — InsureTech, an insurance and financial services agency / software developer since 1984, announced that its software system called InsureTech Pizzazz!™  has been named “Best use of XML” winner and “Best Solution by A Partner” Finalist in the MEC Awards 2001, based upon an innovative Microsoft Exchange 2000 solution the company developed for the insurance and financial services industry.  The awards were given to companies that built innovative business solutions using Exchange 2000’s built-in services and its support for Web-standard protocols, including Extensible Markup Language (XML) and WebDAV. Winners were announced October 1, 2001 in Orlando, Florida.

The Best Use of XML category recognizes solutions, products, or services that positively impacts strategic business processes and extends the value of Exchange 2000 by the innovative and creative use of XML in and with Exchange 2000 to solve real business problems.

Insuretech earned this prominent recognition by delivering a Microsoft Exchange 2000-based ACORD standards compliant solution for insurance and financial service companies.  InsureTech Pizzazz! is designed to facilitate collaboration and improve communication between departments and teams, enhance team productivity, and leverage existing corporate knowledge on all levels of the organization. The solution integrates workspace-oriented solutions for insurance and financial service organizations into a common environment via the Internet.

"Pizzazz shows an excellent example of how Exchange 2000 and XML can deliver a solution to a wide range of users and needs in an industry. Taking industry standards already in place in the insurance industry and building a service based on those with Exchange, XML, and BizTalk is a good step toward .NET solutions."

--Jim Minatel, Editor in Chief, .NET Magazine

"Insuretech has thoroughly integrated its extensive application functionality with Exchange and Outlook and has exploited XML for interoperability with mainframes and other legacy systems, used XML for Web access, and (perhaps most important) built on XML for future expansion. This integral use of Exchange to provide the foundation for business processes for knowledge customer-relationship management and extensive exploitation of XML make this solution the product that best fills the requirements for the Best Use of XML award."

--Karen Forster, Editor in Chief, Windows 2000 Magazine

     “We are extremely pleased to receive this recognition for our efforts to develop applications using Exchange 2000,” said William H. Wakeman III, CFP™, CEO and president of InsureTech.  “This validates that InsureTechPizzazz! extends the value of Exchange 2000 to automate business processes and empower employees to improve productivity.   

              Award finalists were honored and the winners in each of the award categories were announced at the beginning of MEC, the infrastructure planning and deployment conference held in Orlando, Fla. .