United States
New York , 15 September 2011

Mercer, a global leader in human resources consulting, investments and outsourcing, has been named to InformationWeek’s 2011 Top 250, an annual ranking of the nation’s most innovative users of business technology. Mercer received special recognition as a member of the magazine’s elite Top 100, and is featured in the magazine’s “20 Innovative IT Ideas to Steal.”

InformationWeek recognized Mercer for its innovative centralization of complicated pension actuarial calculations used by its Retirement Service Centers. Mercer created Retirement Studio to replace a legacy system, which underutilized newer, multi-core processors and could not distribute jobs across multiple servers. So the IT team in Mercer’s Retirement, Risk and Finance business rewrote the calculation engine to utilize a private cloud using Microsoft high-performance computing and Windows Compute Cluster Server.

Retirement Studio now processes more than 5 million records a day across five data centers and has improved processing time by a factor of 100. Mercer’s next step will be to tap into the public-cloud for added capacity during times of peak usage.

InformationWeek identifies and honors the nation's most innovative users of information technology with its annual 500 listing and also tracks the technology, strategies, investments and administrative practices of America’s best-known companies. Additional details on the InformationWeek rankings can be found online at http://www.informationweek.com/1309.

About Mercer
Mercer is a global leader in human resource consulting, outsourcing and investment services. Mercer works with clients to solve their most complex benefit and human capital issues by designing, implementing and administering health, retirement and other benefit programs. Mercer’s investment services include investment consulting, implemented consulting and multi-manager investment management. Mercer’s 20,000 employees are based in more than 40 countries. The company is a wholly owned subsidiary of Marsh & McLennan Companies, Inc., which lists its stock (ticker symbol: MMC) on the New York and Chicago stock exchanges. For more information, visit www.mercer.com/retirement.