Early last week, I attended the ACORD/LOMA 2010 conference. I had never attended one before even though I've been in the insurance industry for quite some time. What is ACORD/LOMA? In short, ACORD is the technical standards body for the insurance industry and LOMA is composed of the training folk who help technologists learn insurance domain knowledge.
This year, the conference was held in Las Vegas at the Mandalay Bay casino.The facility is top notch and Vegas is certainly a city that's all about the convention. The only negative is that it's a 15 minute commute by foot between the rooms and the convention area. Beyond that, the food was good and the staff pleasant.
As to the show itself, it was a nice blend of sessions for the agency, the carrier and vendors. While it had the tendency to become commercialized at times (what show isn't?), it still was chock-full of topics and issues that are helpful to me in my role as a product manager. The show didn't have an obvious theme, though I was surprised at how much the larger vendors have moved into the insurance space. I'm familiar with all the various insurance vendors, but now joining the effort are the household names such as Microsoft, Oracle and HP. Each of these were platinum providers and are clearly starting to pay attention to the insurance vertical.
Other items of note are a continued emphasis on the standards we know and love, such as ACORD XML, Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and the move of services to the cloud. Microsoft was intensely emphatic about the latter and freely mentioned their Azure platform, Sharepoint 2010 and the Microsoft Dynamics CRM platform.
I am not sure where all of this will lead, but I hope to attend next year's conference to continue to see how the industry looks to evolve.
As to the show itself, it was a nice blend of sessions for the agency, the carrier and vendors. While it had the tendency to become commercialized at times (what show isn't?), it still was chock-full of topics and issues that are helpful to me in my role as a product manager. The show didn't have an obvious theme, though I was surprised at how much the larger vendors have moved into the insurance space. I'm familiar with all the various insurance vendors, but now joining the effort are the household names such as Microsoft, Oracle and HP. Each of these were platinum providers and are clearly starting to pay attention to the insurance vertical.
Other items of note are a continued emphasis on the standards we know and love, such as ACORD XML, Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and the move of services to the cloud. Microsoft was intensely emphatic about the latter and freely mentioned their Azure platform, Sharepoint 2010 and the Microsoft Dynamics CRM platform.
I am not sure where all of this will lead, but I hope to attend next year's conference to continue to see how the industry looks to evolve.
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