Copyright © 2003 Business Insurance

"Microsoft, ACORD Settle Dispute" June 2, 2003

by MICHAEL BRADFORD

Microsoft Corp. boosted its presence at this year's Assn. for Cooperative Research & Development conference after resolving some differences with the insurance standards organization.

"We tripled our size-we're doing a much bigger presence," said Josh Lee, managing director and lead strategist for insurance at Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft. He said the company's booth at the ACORD conference exhibit hall, like last year's smaller version, featured a number of business partners whose products are applications that use a Microsoft platform.

Microsoft is a longtime exhibitor at the show, but in recent years it had stepped back as it questioned the relevance of some of ACORD's moves to implement data standards, Mr. Lee pointed out. He said ACORD's work with standards for insurers and agents didn't allow for "lightweight transactions" between them and Microsoft.

Those differences have been resolved, though, and Microsoft is working with ACORD on standards development, according to Mr. Lee. "We're back to a happy place now," he said.

Microsoft decided to increase its presence at the conference, held last month in Orlando, Fla., because technological changes have caused "a lot of partners to emerge as new entities in the independent software space," and many are using Microsoft's platform, Mr. Lee remarked.

At the conference, Microsoft and ACORD announced that the association will provide more than 500 insurance forms built with Microsoft's new Office InfoPath 2003 application. InfoPath uses the extensible markup language-or XML-data standard and XML-based Web services to enable agents to complete forms once and link the data to other forms, databases, back-end systems and applications.

© Copyright Business Insurance 2003