We share our top four takeaways from this year’s Guidewire Connections.
Guidewire’s Annual Conference, Guidewire Connections 2021, was a four-day event held in Las Vegas, Nevada. Guidewire had this yearly event in-person for the first time since 2019, and it was great opportunity to hear the latest news, innovations and changes to the Guidewire platform.
Let’s look at the four key takeaways from Guidewire Connections 2021.
1. The Cloud is Guidewire’s Top Imperative
At last year’s conference, the main takeaway for attendees was Guidewire’s focus on cloud and encouraging customers to adopt this model. This continued as the focal point of Connections 2021. Guidewire’s CEO, Mike Rosenbaum, kicked off the keynote by reminding us how fast innovation is moving in the insurance space.
In the past, we could tackle innovation with a project every few years, but now we live in a world that forces insurance companies to evolve continuously. The conference promoted Guidewire Cloud Platform as the innovative engine that can make this difficult process of constant evolution possible.
For the past two years, the Guidewire Cloud Platform has been the number one investment of Guidewire. At the conference, they announced the cloud platform is now available worldwide, and 25 percent of Guidewire customers are now on their cloud journey. Since the release of Guidewire Cloud in Aspen in 2020, they have had over 4,500 deployments. The Guidewire Cloud Platform has recently surpassed the 50-customer mark and currently has over 600 environments running, including production and development across all customers.
2. Innovation Hits the Fast Lane with Dobson
The keynote message announced Dobson, the latest release of Guidewire’s market-leading cloud platform. The Dobson release of the Guidewire Cloud Platform enables cloud agility and empowers developers to accelerate innovation. Some key features are:
- Guidewire GO – The Guidewire Marketplace has expanded with GO products. This new library features over 35 Guidewire-approved, pre-built LOB content. They enable insurers to launch products or lines of business faster on InsuranceSuite and InsuranceNow.
- Cloud Integration Framework – Integrations are now faster to deploy and maintain with the Integration Gateway. This cloud microservice externalizes integration logic so that apps can be connected easily. App Events powers event-driven integrations that enable cross-application workflows. The cloud API provides access to business logic and data with a standard versioned set of modern core APIs.
- HazardHub – Now integrated with PolicyCenter, HazardHub provides underwriters with data and risk insights for US commercial property in seconds, enabling them to better understand, assess and price property risks.
- Blue/Green Deployment – A new DevOps service that empowers developers to continuously innovate and update configurations with zero downtime. Developers can make changes easily and promote code to production without disruption, enabling business continuity.
- Micro-Bop Solution – This end-to-end, stand-alone InsuranceSuite solution is optimized to serve home-based or small businesses. Insurers can go live with complete, specialized offerings tailed to Micro-BOP in as little as 12 weeks.
3. Reinvigoration of Guidewire Live
During the keynote, Guidewire also unveiled Guidewire Live, a suite of analytics apps that deliver real-time insights across the insurance lifecycle. Live enables insurers to leverage curated, validated data from high-value data sources. Five apps integrate with core systems to embed intelligence within your workflows and enable continuous learning for more accurate decision-making for claims managers, underwriters, risk managers and actuaries. These applications are:
- Explore – This measures, monitors and improves operational performance to drive business impact.
- Predict – This embeds AI throughout the insurance lifecycle to predict any outcome.
- Assess – This enables continuous underwriting to price small-business risk with confidence.
- Respond – This optimizes CAT management by allowing catastrophe response teams to geo-visualize claims and policy locations.
- Compare – This empowers proactive claim analysis to benchmark your performance against peer and industry standards.
4. Enabling the Digital Tomorrow with Guidewire Jutro
The final announcement of the conference was about the strides that Guidewire has taken to expand Jutro’s capabilities to facilitate design-like development and make the implementation of digital front ends more efficient.
Two principal elements drove Jutro’s progress: reusable components and metadata. Guidewire plans to expand the number of components available in the upcoming releases, making it easier for developers to use and, ultimately, enable digital agility.
The two new components Guidewire is developing for Jutro are:
- App Templates: An app framework that includes UX design layout and business logic –
This will dramatically reduce the time to deliver and build new digital experiences. Developers created it, but users can easily configure it.
- Micro Frontends: Fully self-contained digital apps designed for maximum reusability –
They are critical, functional building blocks that are easily configurable, embeddable anywhere and upgrade safe. The first Micro Frontends created are “Quote & Buy” and “Submit A Claim,” but many more are to come as these apps are believed to be the core of digital agility.
Summary
Guidewire Connections 2021 celebrated the innovation happening in the Guidewire community today and showcased how they will continue to help insurers evolve efficiently in these unprecedented times. Guidewire will hold its next annual conference at the Aria Resort & Casino in Las Vegas, Nevada, from October 23-26, 2022. We look forward to seeing you then!