Over the past few years, more vendor solutions have come online that can help small and medium carriers do more or at least not be at a competitive disadvantage," says Paul McDonnell, senior vice president and managing director of BearingPoint's insurance practice.

As both a cause and consequence, the interest of property/casualty insurers in replacing or rehabbing policy administration technology continues unabated. In a recent Gartner survey, policy administration still was ranked as the top business priority, reports Kimberly Harris-Ferrante, research vice president at Gartner.

She adds, however, things have been a bit different on the life/annuity side. "We've seen interest in policy administration take a bit of a dive because it's difficult to cost-justify a conversion for a new policy administration system. Therefore, there has been a shift from administration replacement to the desire to improve the existing end-to-end IT platform–leveraging ACORD standards, Web services, SOA, and other tools and technology to get more out of legacy systems," she observes.