“Have a good conference.”

It was a familiar salutation heard throughout the last threedays of the ACORD LOMA Insurance Systems Forum. For one thing, itshows the friendliness of the insurance community. They competelike warriors for business, but they value friendships,particularly for those on the IT side who like to solveproblems.

The phrase also invokes some hope from those who say it—not justfor the one on the receiving end but for the person who utters itas well.

Conferences are an expensive proposition for everyone involved.Airfare, hotel rooms, entertainment, and most important, time awayfrom the office all adds up and causes companies—and attendeesthemselves—to question the value of travel to a conference.

Nowhere is that questioned more than in the world of softwarevendors. They certainly are one of the big attractions to programssuch as ACORD LOMA and one of the reasons associations are able toput on conferences the size of this one, but many of them know thechoice has already been made for them. If their competition isgoing to be here, they have to be here as well.

Nowhere is that competition more evident than in the crazy worldof policy administration systems vendors. By most counts, there areover 60 such vendors operating in that space inNorth Americaandhere at ACORD LOMA you couldn't walk 20 ft. through the exhibithall without tripping over one.

I asked more than one policy admin vendor how the conference hadbeen for them and the responses went from, “I got a lot of leads,”to “I wish there had been more people here.”

Now, before you think this is something that happens only atACORD LOMA, I can guarantee I will get a similar set of responseswhen I attend the IASA Conference and Business Show inSan Diegointwo weeks. Getting some good leads is the one thing that will makea conference a success for them.

Dining in the exhibit hall on Thursday with Deb Smallwood ofStrategy Meets Action, we discussed the whole business ofconferences and she pointed out the amount of content thatattendees have to digest over three days is staggering.

Attendees get bombarded with information, whether it is thegeneral sessions or the breakout sessions they attended, thepitches they received from vendors, or the media—such asme—offering our wares in paper versions, electronically, and overthe airwaves.

It will be several days after I get back to the office before Ican fully digest all that I read and heard here inOrlandothis week.Maybe then I can answer the pleasant thoughts passed on by manypeople here this week with one of my own, “Yeah, I had a goodconference.”