On the theater-of-the-absurd side, we had startling headlines coming out of the latest AUGIE survey, such as: "Agents Are Frustrated With Carriers' Proprietary Tech Systems." No! Really? And here I thought most independent agents just loved the variety offered them by hundreds of proprietary insurer Web sites and administrative systems. Live and learn.

Can anyone explain to me why we continue to ask agents to spend their valuable time answering survey questions to which we already know the answers? To be sure, there was some interesting information coming out of the survey on agents' lack of ability to protect customer privacy and to secure their data. That actually was new and useful. Quite a breakthrough, I'd say.

Behind the scenes, technology giants Microsoft and IBM continued to fight it out for platforms and services dominance in the insurance space. Microsoft announced its Insurance Value Chain Architecture Framework, which according to a company spokesperson, "helps insurance customers buy pre-integrated Microsoft partner applications."

At the same time, the spokesperson dubbed IBM's insurance architecture "proprietary and monolithic, based on IBM product suites and requiring massive consulting contracts to implement."

According to Kevin Kelly, managing director, U.S. insurance industry, for Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft, "Our strategy is to deploy innovation through our partners and through our easy-to-understand framework that is specific to insurance business processing. That reduces integration expense and allows you to choose among the partners."

On the other hand, Norbert Dick, IBM's new general manager, global insurance industry, said of Microsoft, "It has not grown up in the insurance industry. It is not insurance-specific. Its new product is a dramatic change, but we started doing this 12 years ago."

The emphasis, said Dick, should be on business process transformation to increase efficiency and speed workflow for insurers. "This is where IBM is by far more mature [than Microsoft]," he stated. "IBM has been ahead of this for years now. Microsoft is more proprietary."

Meanwhile, software giants SAP and Oracle remained interested onlookers, perhaps hoping to swoop in and grab more insurance business while the platform providers battle each other. If nothing else, this will make for a fascinating next two years as companies are bought and sold and as alliances are forged in an effort to secure a business advantage in the lucrative insurance technology market.

On the show floor, the consensus among exhibitors was most of the traffic they were seeing consisted of other exhibitors. That's not necessarily a bad thing, however, especially if those other exhibitors are your customers.

The real problem, though, was the obvious divide between the property/casualty and life/health universes. At last year's ACORD LOMA, the life/health vendors complained there were too many property/casualty customers roaming the aisles. This year, the situation flip-flopped, with property/casualty vendors decrying the presence of too many life/health customers.

After last year's conference, I said LOMA and ACORD should hold separate shows that address their very different aims. This year, the organizations did a much better job of balancing the programs and exposure at the conference. The fact remains, however, as long as the property/casualty and life/health camps remain so starkly different, discontent will be the norm.

The lesson and, perhaps, this year's truly startling headline is : "Oil and Water Still Don't Mix."