Big Iron's back: after flirting with newer, distributed technology systems, insurers are...

Even in laid-back Hawaii, agents don't want to wait until tomorrow for a reply from an insurer. They want it today. So when Hawaii's largest property/casualty insurer sought to meet the demand for a response time measured in minutes instead of days, it looked to its technology.

Instead of buying a whole new system, however, the Honolulu-based company found the answer it needed in that old workhorse of the business world, the mainframe.

"In order for us to give better customer service, and to serve both our in-house and out-of-the-company end users, we found