Guidewire Software, Inc. and its subsidiaries (Guidewire) provide a technology platform which combines core operations, digital engagement, analytics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence (‘AI’) applications.
The company’s technology platform supports core insurance operations, including underwriting, policy administration, claim management, and billing; insights into data that can improve business decision making; and digital sales, service, and claims experiences for policyholders, a...
Guidewire Software, Inc. and its subsidiaries (Guidewire) provide a technology platform which combines core operations, digital engagement, analytics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence (‘AI’) applications.
The company’s technology platform supports core insurance operations, including underwriting, policy administration, claim management, and billing; insights into data that can improve business decision making; and digital sales, service, and claims experiences for policyholders, agents, and other key stakeholders. The company’s customers are primarily property and casualty insurance carriers.
Guidewire is the platform that P&C insurers trust to engage, innovate, and grow efficiently. The company’s core systems leverage data and analytics, digital, and AI. As a partner to the company’s customers, the company continually evolves to enable their success and assist them in navigating a rapidly changing insurance market.
The company’s core products are InsuranceSuite Cloud, InsuranceNow, and InsuranceSuite for self-managed installations. These products are transactional systems of record that support the entire insurance lifecycle, including insurance product definition, distribution, underwriting, policyholder services, and claims management. The company also sells digital engagement and analytics products. The company’s digital engagement products enable digital sales, omnichannel service, and enhanced claims experiences for policyholders, agents, vendor partners, and field personnel. The company’s analytics offerings enable insurers to manage data more effectively, gain insights into their business, drive operational efficiencies, and underwrite new and evolving risks. To support P&C insurers globally, the company has localized, and will continue to localize, the company’s suite of products for use in a variety of international regulatory, language, and currency environments.
The company’s customers range from some of the largest global insurance companies or their subsidiaries to predominantly national or local insurers that serve specific states and/or regions. The company’s customer engagement is led by the company’s direct sales team and supported by the company’s SI partners. The company maintains and continues to grow its sales and marketing efforts globally, and maintain regional sales centers throughout the world.
Because the company’s platform is critical to its new and existing customers’ businesses, their decision-making and product evaluation process is thorough, which often results in an extended sales cycle. These evaluation periods can extend further if a customer purchases multiple products or is considering a move to a cloud-based subscription for the first time. Sales to new customers also involve extensive customer due diligence and reference checks. The success of the company’s sales efforts relies on continued improvements and enhancements to the company’s products, the introduction of new products, efficient operation of the company’s cloud infrastructure, continued development of relevant local content and automated tools for updating content, content in the Guidewire Marketplace to improve efficiencies, accelerate integration, and provide access to innovation, and successful implementations and migrations.
The company sells its suite of products through subscription services for its platform and cloud-delivered products and term licenses for its self-managed products. The company also offers professional services, both directly and through SI partners, to help the company’s customers deploy, migrate, and utilize the company’s platform and suite of products.
Products
The Guidewire ecosystem is designed so that insurers can increase revenue, reduce operational costs and losses, improve pricing, and engage with a customer base that increasingly demands convenience and automated forms of self-service and communication. The company is investing in research and development to accelerate improvements in the company’s platform and suite of products to better serve the company’s customers.
Core Operational Products
The company offers the following core products: Guidewire InsuranceSuite Cloud, Guidewire InsuranceNow, and Guidewire InsuranceSuite for Self-Managed.
Guidewire InsuranceSuite Cloud
Guidewire InsuranceSuite Cloud is a highly configurable and scalable product, delivered as a service, and primarily consisted of three core applications (PolicyCenter Cloud, BillingCenter Cloud, and ClaimCenter Cloud) that can be subscribed to separately or together. These applications are built on and optimized for the company’s Guidewire Cloud Platform (‘GWCP’) architecture and leverage the company’s in-house cloud operations team. GWCP is a Guidewire-developed infrastructure layer enabled by and hosted on Amazon Web Services (‘AWS’). GWCP’s architecture consists of three primary layers. Specialized cloud infrastructure services and tools are centered around maximizing service and resource availability, optimizing performance, scalability, and cost efficiency, maintaining data security, privacy and regulatory compliance, as well as offering a high degree of service observability to provide customers with better insight and control consistent with their operational needs. The Data Platform layer provides access to core and predictive analytics data to allow creation of curated datasets that can be used to drive delivery of actionable insights across the insurance lifecycle. The App Platform layer contains modular, cloud-native services decoupled from the InsuranceSuite core that can be used individually or interconnected to enhance existing applications and empower creation of new business applications. GWCP was developed to meet the specialized needs of the P&C insurance industry, providing a scalable cloud architecture that combines multi-tenant cloud services and tools with the ability to isolate each customer’s system of record and database instances. This approach provides the company’s customers with the benefits of cloud-native infrastructure and services and the flexibility to provide differentiated services to their customers.
InsuranceSuite Cloud is designed to support multiple releases each year to ensure that cloud customers remain on the latest version and gain fast access to the company’s innovation efforts. Additionally, InsuranceSuite Cloud embeds digital and analytics capabilities natively into the company’s platform. Most new sales and implementations are for InsuranceSuite Cloud.
Guidewire PolicyCenter Cloud is the company’s flexible underwriting and policy administration application that serves as a comprehensive system-of-record supporting the entire policy lifecycle, including product definition, underwriting, quoting, binding, issuance, endorsements, audits, cancellations, and renewals. Guidewire BillingCenter Cloud automates the billing lifecycle, enables the design of a wide variety of billing and payment plans, manages agent commissions, and integrates with external payment systems. Guidewire ClaimCenter Cloud is a complete end-to-end claims management solution that offers core claims functionality. These primary applications also include predictive analytics that drive smart decisions, digital engagement, and an ecosystem of partners and insurtechs.
Guidewire InsuranceNow
Guidewire InsuranceNow is a complete, cloud-based application that offers policy, billing, and claims management functionality, plus pre-integrated document production, analytics, and other capabilities, that increases agility without adding complexity. InsuranceNow is hosted on AWS and managed by the company’s internal cloud operations team.
Guidewire InsuranceSuite for Self-Managed
Guidewire InsuranceSuite for self-managed installations is consisted of three core applications (PolicyCenter, BillingCenter, and ClaimCenter) that can be licensed separately or together and can be deployed and updated by the company’s customers and their implementation partners.
Guidewire InsuranceSuite: Complementary Capabilities and Applications
The company offers several complementary capabilities and applications, some of which are included in the core operational services and products, and all of which are designed to work seamlessly with the company’s core operational services and products, including:
Guidewire Rating Management
Guidewire Rating Management enables P&C insurers to manage the pricing of their insurance services and products.
Guidewire Reinsurance Management
Guidewire Reinsurance Management enables P&C insurers to use rules-based logic to execute their reinsurance strategy through their underwriting and claims processes.
Guidewire Client Data Management
Guidewire Client Data Management helps P&C insurers capitalize on customer information more coherently, overcoming traditional siloed practices that impair efficiency and customer service.
Guidewire Advanced Product Designer
Guidewire Advanced Product Designer is a cloud-native application for insurance product design and management across the complete insurance lifecycle. It enables insurers to launch and update products quickly by providing visual product development tools, prebuilt product model templates, product management capability, and auto generated product code.
Guidewire Product Content Management
Guidewire Product Content Management provides software tools and standards-based, line-of-business templates to enable insurers to more rapidly introduce and modify services and products by reducing product configuration and maintenance efforts. Any such product introduction or modification must connect to and incorporate regulatory or industry-standard data and content, such as Insurance Services Office (‘ISO’) or National Council on Compensation Insurance content.
Guidewire Underwriting Management
Guidewire Underwriting Management is a cloud-based, integrated business application designed for commercial and specialty line insurers to drive premium growth and profit from better underwriting. This feature-rich workstation delivers straight-through processing, exception-based underwriting, real-time collaboration, and knowledge management in one integrated solution. Guidewire Underwriting Management is typically sold alongside Guidewire PolicyCenter, although it functions with other policy administration systems as well.
Guidewire AppReader
Guidewire AppReader is a submission intake management solution that enables P&C insurers to process Association for Cooperative Operations Research and Development forms faster and more accurately than with manual processes or traditional upload solutions. AppReader is available for both Guidewire Underwriting Management and Guidewire PolicyCenter.
Guidewire ClaimCenter Package for the London Market
Guidewire ClaimCenter Package for the London Market supports the claims workflow used by London Market insurers and brokers. Integration of London Market Electronic Claims File Write-Back lets insurers perform tasks and interact with the central industry market Claims Loss and Advice Settlement system directly from Guidewire ClaimCenter through message queues.
Digital Engagement
Guidewire Digital Engagement Applications
The company’s Digital Engagement Applications enable insurers to provide digital experiences to customers, agents, vendors, and field personnel through their device of choice. As consumers increasingly use self-service functions on the internet and on mobile devices, many of them prefer to interact with their insurance providers digitally and that they expect to have a consistent and efficient transactional experience through multiple channels, whether online, in-person or by phone. The company’s Digital Engagement Applications also benefit agents and brokers who are seeking to automate business processes with insurers to improve customer service and productivity. Digital engagement applications are enabled by the Jutro Digital Platform (‘Jutro’), allowing insurers to strengthen customer relationships and brand loyalty while reducing operational cost through easy-to-use, self-service interactions. The focus of Jutro is on empowering ‘digital native users,’ or those who understand and expect to interact with their insurers through digital experiences that are seamless, intuitive, user-friendly, mobile-ready, and omnichannel. In order to provide a holistic experience, Digital Applications are unified with InsuranceSuite.
Data and Analytics
The company offers a variety of applications that allow insurers to uncover hidden opportunities and write more profitable business by enabling a seamless path from data to value.
Guidewire Predict
Guidewire Predict is a P&C-specific machine-learning platform that empowers insurers to make intelligent data-driven decisions throughout the insurance lifecycle. By building (or importing) predictive models built from multiple data sets, designing comprehensive solutions, and operationalizing the predictive insights, Predict allows insurers to rapidly turn any model into business value by delivering guidance to frontline decision makers. Predict for Claims helps customers to better manage claim indemnity and loss-adjustment expenses. Predict for Profitability improves pricing accuracy and customer satisfaction.
Guidewire HazardHub
Guidewire HazardHub allows insurers to understand, assess, price, and manage property risk quickly and intelligently. HazardHub provides a single source of geospatial risk data, and provides access to more than 950 risk variables, including perils from air, water, earth, and fire. HazardHub is a cloud-native solution delivered through an Application Programming Interface that provides access to this information for any personal or commercial property located in 19 countries, including, among others, Australia, France, Germany, New Zealand, South Africa, the United Kingdom (‘U.K.’), and the United States, and has the ability to evaluate an entire portfolio for property risk.
Guidewire Canvas
Guidewire Canvas is a cloud-native application included with ClaimCenter Cloud. It features an interactive map that enables claims management and catastrophe response teams to geo-visualize claims to help improve customer satisfaction and reduce indemnity by proactively responding to storm events.
Guidewire Compare
Guidewire Compare is a cloud-native application included with ClaimCenter Cloud that monitors key claims measures and gives feedback on how those compare against peer insurers in the Guidewire community, or within a single insurer across regions or over time. Compare allows claims organizations to increase their processing efficiency by monitoring key claims measures such as indemnity, expenses, cycle times, reserves, salvage, subrogation, percentage closed, catastrophe, and litigated.
Guidewire Explore
Guidewire Explore is a cloud-native application that gathers and curates InsuranceSuite data in near real-time to augment decision making inside and outside InsuranceSuite. Explore includes free-form search across the data set, along with visualizations and dashboards for common business metrics. It allows business users to examine operational claims data, underwriting management data, and operational policy data.
Guidewire Cyence
Guidewire Cyence is a cyber-risk economic modeling product that helps P&C insurers accurately measure the financial impact of cyber risk on their customers. It does this by capturing data about cyber threats from more than 400 sources, including public, open-source, proprietary, and third-party data. Cyence then curates and analyzes the data through AI and machine-learning statistical models to extract meaningful signals. Based on these models, Cyence produces insights delivered through reports that will predict the likelihood and economic impact of cyber attacks on a target company or individual. This can be used for underwriting, pricing, and developing cyber insurance products.
Guidewire DataHub and InfoCenter
Guidewire DataHub is an operational data store that unifies, standardizes, and stores data from the patchwork of insurer’s systems, as well as from external sources. It is available for self-managed and InsuranceSuite Cloud customers.
Guidewire InfoCenter is a business intelligence warehouse for P&C insurers that provides information in easy-to-use formats for business intelligence, analysis, and enhanced decision making. With Guidewire InfoCenter, insurers gain flexible operational insights, as well as the ability to optimize their business.
Guidewire Marketplace
The Guidewire Marketplace is where insurers find trusted applications and content that complement the Guidewire platform from the company’s PartnerConnect partners, as well as from Guidewire product and services teams. These applications and content help insurers to rapidly innovate and differentiate their businesses by allowing them to leverage capabilities provided by the Guidewire ecosystem to meet their business goals. The Guidewire Marketplace also empowers customers pursuing innovation initiatives by providing access to a curated collection of insurtech applications. Additionally, the company promotes innovation through its Insurtech Vanguards which is a community of select startups and technology providers, bringing transformative solutions to the P&C industry and making innovation more accessible. Nine Insurtech Vanguards have been promoted to the company’s PartnerConnect program. As of July 31, 2024, the Guidewire Marketplace had over 215 partner-developed integrations that have been awarded Ready for Guidewire validation and hundreds of Guidewire-developed resources available for download. The company is continually expanding the breadth of functionality and depth of partnerships in the Guidewire Marketplace.
Services
The company provides implementation, cloud migration, and integration services to help its customers realize the benefits of the company’s products. The company’s delivery services teams assist customers in building implementation or migration plans, integrating the company’s software with their existing systems, and defining business rules and specific requirements unique to each customer. The company also partners with leading SI consulting firms, certified on the company’s software, to achieve scalable, cost-effective implementations for the company’s customers.
The company’s investments in services and partners are designed to ensure customer success by committing appropriate resources to both cloud-based and self-managed implementation projects.
Customer Support
The company provides support for its subscription customers as part of the company’s subscription services and to its license customers for an annual fee based on a percentage of the license fees. Subscription services also include regular updates to Guidewire software to ensure that Guidewire Cloud customers can easily access the company’s latest innovations. New capabilities are often toggled-off so that customers can activate them at the right time for their businesses. This enables the company’s customers to deliver improvements at a steady pace, optimized for their employees and customers.
The company’s subscriptions include Guidewire Cloud Assurance Services, which provides for review of all configurations and integrations to ensure they follow published standards, best practices and required security methodologies. Furthermore, the company’s internal cloud operations team monitors application performance and the company’s customer success team works directly with customers to optimize adoption, user experience, and business requirements.
Customers
The company markets and sells its products to a wide variety of global P&C insurers ranging from some of the largest global insurers to national, regional, and state companies. The company focuses on developing and maintaining its customer relationships through customer service and account management. Customers are defined as entities that have placed orders for the company’s services or products. In some instances, a parent corporation can have multiple entities, or insurance brands, that place orders for the company’s services or products and, in other instances, customers are in industries adjacent to the insurance industry and do not have an insurance brand. As of July 31, 2024, the company had approximately 470 customers representing approximately 570 insurance brands in 42 countries.
Strategic Relationships
The company has extensive relationships with SI, consulting, technology, and industry partners. The company’s network of partners has expanded as interest in and adoption of the company’s platform has grown. The company encourages its partners to co-market, pursue joint sales initiatives, obtain certifications related to the company’s products, and drive broader adoption of the company’s technology, helping the company grows its business more efficiently and enabling the company to focus its resources on continued innovation and further enhancement of the company’s solutions.
The company works with its network of third-party SI partners to facilitate new sales and implementations of the company’s products. The company’s partnerships with leading SI partners allow the company to increase efficiency and scale. The company continues to invest time and resources to increase the number of qualified consultants employed by the company’s SI partners, develop relationships with new partners in existing and new markets, and ensure that all SI partners are qualified to assist with implementing the company’s products. This model will continue to serve the company wells, and the company intends to continue to expand its network of partners and the number of certified consultants with whom the company works so the company can leverage its SI partners more effectively, especially for future subscription migrations and implementations.
As part of the company’s PartnerConnect alliance program, the company has a community of solution partners developing integrations that enable software and insurance business solutions to interoperate with the company’s products, many of which are in the Guidewire Marketplace. These integrations help customers reduce implementation risk and effort, and lower the total cost of implementation and operation.
Sales and Marketing
Consistent with the company’s industry focus and the mission-critical needs the company’s products address, its sales and marketing efforts are tailored to communicate effectively to senior executives within the P&C insurance industry. The company’s sales, marketing, customer success, and executive teams work together to cultivate long-term relationships with current and prospective customers in each of the geographies in which the company is active.
The company’s direct sales team serves as both its exclusive sales channel and the company’s account management function and is organized by geographic region across the Americas, EMEA, and APAC. The company augments its sales professionals with a pre-sales team possessing insurance domain and technical expertise, who engage customers to understand their specific business needs and then represent the company’s products through demonstrations tailored to address those needs.
The company’s marketing team supports sales with competitive analysis and sales tools, while investing to strengthen the company’s brand name and reputation. The company participates at industry conferences, are published frequently in the industry press, and have active relationships with all of the major industry analysts. The company also hosts Connections, its annual customer conference, where customers both participate in and deliver presentations on a wide range of Guidewire and insurance technology topics. The company invites potential customers and partners to its customer conference, as customer references are a key component of driving new sales. The company’s strong relationships with leading system integrators enhance its direct sales through co-marketing efforts and by providing additional market validation of the distinctiveness and quality of the company’s offerings.
Competition
The company’s competitors include, but are not limited to, customers’ internally developed proprietary solutions; P&C insurance software vendors, such as Duck Creek, EIS Group, Insurity, Majesco, Origami Risk, and Sapiens; and horizontal software vendors, such as SAP SE and Salesforce.
Intellectual Property
The company owns or has pending patents and patent applications, which generally apply to its software. The company’s owned patents have expiration dates starting in 2026. The company also relies on several registered and unregistered trademarks, as well as pending applications for such registrations, in order to protect the company’s brand both in the United States and internationally.
Seasonality
The company has experienced seasonal variations in its license revenue, and to a lesser extent, in the company’s subscription revenue as a result of increased customer orders in the company’s fourth fiscal quarter (year ended July 2024) due to efforts by the company’s sales team to achieve annual incentives. Subscription sales now represent the significant majority of total sales and, as a result when compared to term license sales, the revenue the company recognizes in the initial fiscal year of an order is lower, deferred revenue is higher.
The company’s services revenue is also subject to seasonal fluctuations, though to a lesser degree than the company’s license revenue and subscription revenue. The company’s services revenue is impacted by the number of billable days in a given fiscal quarter. The fiscal quarter ending January 31 usually has fewer billable days due to the impact of calendar year end holidays in the United States. The company’s fourth fiscal quarter usually has fewer billable days due to the impact of vacations taken by the company’s services professionals. Because the company pays its services professionals the same amount throughout the year, the company’s gross margins on its services revenue are usually lower in these quarters.
History
Guidewire Software, Inc., a Delaware corporation, was founded in 2001. The company was incorporated in 2001.
